With cries of pain and anguish, many of the drow archers dropped their weapons or turned away from the painful blast of light. In another second, Halloran charged among them, and Helmstooth found the bodies of many of the blinded, stumbling drow.

Poshtli followed, striking a drow with his steel sword, knocking the blow of another aside. The warrior staggered, weakened from the arrow wounds he had suffered just moments before and atop the palace, and one of the dark elves saw his weakness. With a sudden lunge, the drow drove his blade toward the Nexalan.

Twisting away, Poshtli tried to stop the blow, but the black blade knocked his own sword aside. Continuing the lunge, the drow stabbed the warrior in the chest. With a dull moan, Poshtli sprawled onto his back, bleeding.

Erixitl faced the Ancestor as the wizened, decrepit drow hobbled forward, coming around the deep pit of fire. The elf held a wand or some kind of weapon in his hand, a short staff with an evil-looking tip like the outspread claws of a small dragon.

Erix stood, strangely unmoving, before him as he raised the clawlike staff. He was perhaps halfway around the crater when a sudden, searing hiss filled the cave, and red light exploded in tiny beams from the claws on the Ancestor's wand. Each of these rays of light merged with the others into a heavy bolt of solid crimson energy that smashed into Erixitl with crushing force.

Her pluma token puffed upward, and the gust of wind that had sheltered her from Darien's magic swiftly swirled around Erix. But the power of the attack blew this protection aside, bashing Erix backward and flattening her to the floor. The Cloak of One Plume billowed behind her.

She lay there, moaning, as the Ancestor took another step and raised the weapon again. He had come nearly all the way around the caldron and soon would loom directly over her. Halloran started for Erixitl, not knowing what he could do. He heard the Ancestor laugh, a harsh, cruel sound.

But neither he nor the aged drow anticipated another reaction. Chitikas – coiled, motionless, and apparently unconscious throughout the battle – suddenly exploded from his coil. The wingless couatl drove like a spear toward the Ancestor.

Chitikas's fangs sought the throat of his victim, but the Ancestor barely managed to knock the snake's bead to the side. For a moment, the two of them teetered on the brink of the bubbling caldron. The snake's tail lashed around, striking the spellbook where Hal had left it. Darien, still imprisoned by hishna, screamed as the tome toppled into the Darkfyre.

Hal reached Erixitl's side, kneeling to sweep her into his arms. She sobbed against him, helplessly watching the struggle. "Chitikas!" she cried.

Then, locked in their desperate fight, the couatl and the Ancestor fell slowly, following the spellbook into the flaring caldron.

Hoxitl paused for a long, splendid moment, basking in the full scope of his triumph. Below him, the cleric of the strangers' god stared bug-eyed at his poised dagger. The Bishou's lips were flecked with spit, his tongue protruded, and the veins in his face seemed ready to burst.

The priest of Zaltec leered at him, and then began to lower the dagger. With a quick, sharp slash, the stone tip met the skin of the cleric of Helm.

And it pierced that skin, slicing a deep wound into Domincus, though the cleric still lived. Hoxitl thrust his bloody hand into the wound, grasping the Bishou's heart as he had taken thousands of hearts before, ready to pull it forth and offer it to the gaping maw of the statue Zaltec.

But this time, when his hand met the Bishou's flesh, the two gods came together with a force that overwhelmed the cleric's mortal powers.

Behind and far, far above Hoxitl, unseen in the rain but heard by them all, the top of Mount Zatal exploded.

From the chronicles of Colon:

At last the gods converge, and in their meeting, they tear the world asunder.

In the temple of Qotal, I feel the powers come together. Zaltec and Helm clash as the cleric of one tears the heart from the cleric of the other. Such a sacrifice must forever change the face of the land.

And even Qotal through the harbinger of his couatl, meets Zaltec, as Chitikas gives his life to the Darkfyre. The feathered snake is a meal even hungry Zaltec cannot digest.

Below them all, but rising fast, Lolth seethes now with the passion of her vengeance. She explodes into this world through the Darkfyre, laying her punishment upon her children, the drow.

And the gaming board is swept of its pieces.

Gultec wandered far from the jungles of Tulom-Itzi, crossing the lands of the Payit, the Kultakans, the Pezelacs. Always he moved toward Nexal.

Sometimes he walked as a man, visiting the peoples he passed among, learning of their fear. In all these lands, he found a deep foreboding, a great and dire anticipation of terrible things to come.

Other times he soared as a bird, or skulked within the mighty jaguar body that still gave him so much pleasure. He found, in his meandering course, several deep, lush valleys where he had thought lay only desert. Much to his surprise, several of these valleys contained ripe meadows of mayz. No one had planted it there, he knew, for this was deepest wilderness. Yet he remembered this abundance of food, enough for many people, as he pressed onward through the wilds of Maztica.

His course steady, his own courage unfailing, he finally reached the shores of Nexal's lakes.

And here he witnessed the source of the True World's terror.

Halloran sensed Erixitl's arms around him, and he clung to her with all the strength of his mindless terror. Around them the world came to pieces. Chaos reigned.

He didn't wonder why they weren't burned to ashes immediately. He saw fire in the form of red, liquid rock, exploding upward and outward in a wave of certain death. But that wave washed around them, and he knew only that Erix was in his arms, that the two of them were together, and it seemed certain they would die that way.

Squeezing his eyes shut, Hal tried to block out the nightmare around them, but he could not. Still he saw glowing crimson liquid splashing, he saw the summit of the huge mountain as it crumbled and collapsed around them. Rain poured into the cavern, creating a hissing inferno of steam, shattering rock and boiling away the instant it reached the ground.

Slowly the horrors around him seemed to fade, and he knew only that he held the woman he loved. He loved her more than he had ever thought he could love, and he desperately wanted to soothe the trembling he could feel in her body.

"Are you… alive?" asked Erix some time later. He wondered at first whether he had dreamed her voice.

"I… don't know," he replied honestly. "I think so, but I don't know how."

"I do," she replied, still dreamily nuzzling her face into the hollow of his neck. "It is the will of Qotal."

Halloran looked around them at the inferno of flame and molten rock and explosive gases. For the first time, he realized that they hadn't remained immobile during the eruption. Instead, they floated with the force of the blast, riding gently in the shelter of the…

What did protect them? He noticed that they watched the fiery chaos through a spiderweb-like grid. Looking closer, he recognized a pattern of feathers and down, creating a globe only large enough to hold the two of them.

"My cloak," explained Erix, still speaking as if she were dazed. "It is truly the gift of Qotal, and so it protects us, holding the fires of Zaltec at bay." Indeed, the Cloak of One Plume encircled them both, protecting them from the inferno yet showing them the full, horrifying devastation wrought by the gods.