A traitorous Solamnic Knight, who had slain both his children and still found no harbor for his anger.

A cleric or two, or perhaps even more than that.

Between them, the times were fitful, fragmented.

Sargonnas had forgotten most of the visitants, for they were inconsequential-little men who trusted in nothing until it became unbearable, then trusted in Sargonnas.

Who betrayed them as quickly, as readily as he could, according to their weaknesses. Who reopened the wounds that had brought them to call on him in the first place, and let them watch as the old wound festered and spread and devoured them like fire or acid or vengeance.

Firebrand was the most recent, though not the most distinguished. Nonetheless, if things came to pass as Sargonnas had foreseen and planned, the Namer of the Que-Tana would be the last of the visitants. Any day now the dark gods would return to Krynn.

For along with the self-styled king of the Que-Tana…

There was the worm.

Under the surface of Ansalon the dale worm Tellus slept, dreaming of light and movement and terrible arousal.

Back in the Age of Dreams, when the dark gods fell into the deepest of banishments, the door to the bright world was sealed after them. All of them-Morgion and Hiddukel and Sargonnas and the Dark Queen Takhisis-spun and tumbled in confusion down into the depths of the Abyss, where falling ceased to be falling, because like everything else around them, it, too, had become nothing. They rested on nothing, there in the center of nothing, and they thought long thoughts of exile.

At their banishment, Tellus, who had hovered at the edge of awakening, had trembled once beneath the surface of the world and settled back into a sleep of nearly three millennia.

A sleep that was about to end. And when the dark gods flooded the world, only one of them would know its peoples. Only one would have… a history with him. And to him all worshipers would flock. For the dale worm was power, but the eyes in the crown were knowledge.

Consort of Darkness no longer, he would be Darkness itself.

Sargonnas closed his predator's eye, a rumble of contentment rising from his throat as the ground above him trembled. Slowly he remembered once again his triumph, for exile in the Abyss led even a god to repeat his thoughts.

The device, he thought, was set millennia ago… by Huma himself. How sweet and ingenious! But its intricacy hides a simple magic.

When its time comes, it will rouse the worm. Nothing more than that.

And the worm, awakened, will rush toward the surface beneath which it has slept since the Age of Dreams, tearing open the continent from Palanthas to Port Balifor.

The Cataclysm come again, it will be, and it will be our portal into the world.

Quickly Sargonnas rose in the Abyss like a vulture on a thermal wind, wheeling slowly over a battlefield as a wounded bird for water.

He wheeled over history, circling and remembering. I thank my fortune for that fool the Scorpion, he thought. Just one more visitant who thought-as every visitant thinks-that he could make the gods do his bidding.

When his thoughts first reached in my direction, I returned with them as a small voice in the recesses of his imaginings, as I do, sooner or later, to all of them.

It took me years to convince him that my voice was a part of his thinking.

And when I did, the rest was easy. Again Sargonnas laughed, and the earth trembled in grim accordance.

"What was that?" Gileandos asked nervously, leaping away from the wall as though it were molten metal.

"Perhaps," Bayard replied apprehensively, "it is the promised Rending."

"Well," Gileandos announced, turning quickly and striding back into the shadows, toward the way up and the castle and the light. His footsteps echoed down the corridor and stopped.

Nobody was following.

Instead, the rest of them-Andrew and Robert, Bayard and Enid, Marigold, Raphael, and Brandon-stood in a circle, pondering the creature beside them, the quake above and below and around them.

Whatever the creature was, it was as black and impenetrable as onyx.

"It's like… the thing is as big as the castle," Enid whispered, slipping her arm around Bayard. "Or even the Vingaard River."

At Bayard's other side, Sir Brandon nodded.

"Right you are, m'lady," he said, "and I for one would rather not chance a tangle with it."

"How about… a stroll around it, Brandon?" Bayard asked, his face unreadable, turned away from the torchlight.

Behind them, Gileandos whimpered in the darkness.

Brandon stood there silently for some time. His face, too, was obscured, but from the tilt of his shoulders, you could tell he was reluctant, that Solamnic honor wrestled with good sense in his faculties. Finally he nodded.

"Around it, it is, if you say so, Sir Bayard. Though I find it hard to think of it as a stroll."

He took a tentative step forward into the corridor beyond them.

"Not so quickly, Brandon," Sir Robert protested, chivalrously hoisting Marigold's bag of food to his shoulders, where he tied the cords securely in a knapsack of sorts. "Whatever the creature is beside us, the way in front of us bears closer inspection before you wade blithely into it."

"Sir Robert is right, Brandon," Bayard admitted. "What is more, we shall need your stout back to carry me along. After all, it will just be the two of us from this point on."

After Bayard's words sank in, it was Enid di Caela's turn to protest.

"I know there's something all knightly and manly in this, Bayard Brightblade," she said. "I also know that I'm not supposed to understand. You'll say I don't understand, and you'll leave it at that. But I cannot stand here and let you get yourself killed for a posture."

"You don't understand, Enid," Bayard replied with a crooked, brief smile. He gestured to Raphael, and the boy drew from his pack a strong, light cord-a Plainsman twist, good in a traveler's hands. Bayard tied the cord once, twice about his waist.

"You have heard the stories about the mazes of the minotaurs?" he asked his dumbstruck companions. "How a light cord taken in to the labyrinth can be followed out to safety?"

"I am not about to be widowed by my husband's damned recklessness," Enid insisted.

"Nor does he intend to widow you thus," Bayard replied formally, absently, tightening the third knot. "Now, Brandon, if you'd be so kind as to help me along, we'll find where the worm ends, or where the device lies of which the chronicles speak. And I'll wager from the shaking of the earth about us that we aren't far-that indeed, we will not need all of the rope we carry.

Brandon took the rope in hand. He stared at it long and intently, as though it were a thousand years old, a relic the use of which had been forgotten. Bayard gave the cord a short, playful tug, and it slid from the young man's hands. "I hope you plan to maintain that thing a little more ardently, Brandon," Sir Robert muttered, and the young man muttered something back-inaudible and fierce. He picked up the rope, tied it tightly around his own waist, and nodded brusquely to Bayard.

Suddenly, Sir Andrew stepped forward, grabbed onto the far end of the rope, and bound it tightly around his own hand. The stocky old fellow tested the strength of the cord, then nodded to his young companions.

"Well, boys, I can't say enough about how foolish this idea of Bayard's strikes me," he said. "But he's going through that corridor come Cataclysm again. Such places are known for the worst of footing-the ground can fall away from under you with a single false step in the shadows. I cannot speak for any of you, but I'll be damned if I'll see Solamnic knights let one of their own take a tumble."