Under the Crimson Sun

Keith R.A. Decandido Under the Crimson Sun

PROLOGUE

When you’re immortal, you literally have all the time in the world to craft and implement plans. If one plan fails, it matters little, for there is plenty of time to try another.

But when there is no way to bring the plans to fruition, it becomes the worst prison an immortal could endure.

No doubt when two gods, Pelor and Ioun, imprisoned a third, Tharizdun, in a desolate void, they had thought it to be doubly devastating. The Chained God had eternity to plot and plan, and eternity to sit in frustration.

And indeed, Tharizdun had come up with dozens, thousands, millions of plans to make his escape. Each was brilliant in its own way, clever and sublime.

And each was wholly unworkable, because there was nothing else in that endless deserted wasteland. The Chained God had investigated the universe quite thoroughly, used all the means at his disposal to find something amidst the endless wastes.

He found nothing.

He knew it was fruitless to keep searching, but while he had nothing to work with, he also had nothing better to do.

So he sought something, anything besides himself.

It was impossible to tell how long he had been there. Even when he had been among the revered gods, Tharizdun had rarely concerned himself with the passage of time. That was a concern of the mortal coil. What did he care about the march of history when he was unaffected by it? He did not age, did not change, but was constant regardless.

Yet even the markers that mortals used were denied him there. There were no suns or moons to rise and fall, no celestial bodies to orbit one another in measurable sequence.

Were he mortal, he would have long since gone mad and died.

But Tharizdun was a god, so such luxuries were denied him.

Ioun and Pelor had probably thought that particular universe to be a fitting prison. After all, Tharizdun had opened the Living Gate and later unleashed the Abyss on the universe. He had hoped to wreak death and destruction-the very same that was inflicted upon the universe to which he’d been exiled.

But, as usual, his fellow gods missed the point. They always did.

To Tharizdun, the destruction rendered to this universe was meaningless. It wasn’t the end result that was of interest to Tharizdun, it was the process. Eventually, his home universe might be like this desolate place, but to get there, billions of years would have to pass, a near infinite number of agonies would be written on the souls of the living, chaos would overtake order in a beautiful conflagration.

The gods that put him in his prison would see their creation rent asunder. It would be a slow, laborious, magnificent journey. An unraveling of all that had been done. And from that destruction, something new would arise in its place, something that Tharizdun had done.

Because he had no concept of spans of time within this dead place, Tharizdun had no idea when, exactly, it was that he found the red crystalline liquid. But it was, at last, a break in the monotony of imagining what would be.

He recognized the liquid crystal for what it was.

Tharizdun had once used the shard of an ancient, powerful crystal to unleash the Abyss on his own universe.

Though liquefied, this red substance he found himself standing before now derived from the same great crystal.

It was the Progenitor of Chaos. He could feel it.

More than that-he could hear it. The same whispery importuning to be unleashed that had come from the crystal in his own world spoke to Tharizdun now.

Set me free, it said. Let me loose.

“I cannot even free myself,” Tharizdun said with frustration. “Besides, your work here is done.”

The ignominy hit him like a spell. Here he had unfettered access to the Progenitor, to the liquid crystal that embodied all the spectacular chaos that Tharizdun had tried to unleash on his own universe-and he could do nothing with it. It had done its work here and lay useless.

As useless as Tharizdun himself was. But perhaps there was a way …

So Tharizdun began to concentrate, to focus and project his will into the void and beyond. With enough clarity of purpose, he would be able to contact those in the world of the gods that needed him most. The disenfranchised, the downtrodden, those whose existence was most tenuous. They would hear his call and do their part. While the conscious minds of his followers were denied him, the murky veil of the dreamscape proved accessible.

It was an imperfect method of communication. Through the dreams of his worshipers, he was able to reassure them that he did live, in an exile much like their own, and that his return would mean destruction of the structures that denied. Tharizdun could give his followers little beyond dreams, but the promises they held were powerful. And he could give them the impetus for that revolution.

Tharizdun knew that there was a ritual that could make use of a fragment of the Living Gate to open a portal between the worlds. Tharizdun-in the company of his fellow gods-had found the Living Gate in the depths of the Astral Sea, and Tharizdun had opened it, unleashing the horrors of the Far Realm upon his home universe.

Fragments of the Gate existed, and if Tharizdun’s worshipers performed the ritual in his abandoned dominion of Pandemonium, a tiny tear could be opened between realities.

Tharizdun had never explored that option because the portal needed to be opened on both sides in order to break free of Pelor and Ioun’s chains.

But he had found a tool by which to bridge the gap between universes.

And so Tharizdun formed a hand of darkness and reached out to the red liquid. “Both of us are trapped, but together we can be free. Together, we will unleash our might upon the people of the world. And they will drown in blood.”

The Progenitor undulated and flowed at the Chained God’s touch, encircling the darkness and bone of his form.

It too had been alone for immeasurable time. It too hungered for purpose.

Alone, both Tharizdun and the Progenitor were helpless. Together, they might be able to free themselves from this void.

The Chained God combined two existing plans into a third that might, at last, bring both him and the Progenitor out of that forsaken emptiness.

The next step was to once again pierce the gulf and speak to his worshipers through their nightmares. Or, rather, speak to one particular worshiper.

It was always a tricky thing. From a god’s perspective, the ideal worshiper was one who did so unthinkingly. There was no devotion quite like mindless devotion, uncluttered as it was by reason.

But Tharizdun needed a task to be performed, one that would require dedication and ingenuity and an ability