"Run, man! Run for your Men" Cordell gasped at Daggrande. The two legionnaires staggered like drunks along the nightmarishly contorted causeway. Finally they reached the city, even as waves crashed over the narrow roadway and carried it into the black depths of the steaming lake.

"Where?" groaned the dwarf, pausing to fill his straining lungs with air. The ground heaved and buckled underfoot, and they both sprawled to the stones of the street.

"The lakeshore – it's our only chance! We can steal some canoes and get out of here!"

Once again they lumbered forward. A huge beast reared out of the darkness before them, chomping its fang-filled maw. It reached out a wickedly clawed hand, striking for Cordell's face.

"Look, by Helm!" cried the captain-general, stumbling backward in horror.

On the breast of the beast, like a blood-red scar, Cordell saw the diamond-shaped brand of the Viperhand.

Daggrande chopped at the troll with his axe, driving the monster backward and pushing it out of the stream of escaping refugees. Then the men swept past, losing sight of the beast in the swirling advance of the mob.

The fleeing Mazticans, like the few legionnaires among them, hurried toward the lake, trying to escape the crumbling city. Buildings fell, toppling across roadways and crushing hundreds of people at a time. Great cracks opened in the ground, and these swiftly filled with water, forming deep and treacherous moats where moments earlier had stood a pastoral garden or graceful two-story manor.

More and more of the soldiers joined with them as they passed. Cordell saw the weeping form of Kardann huddled beside the road. He roughly pulled the assessor to his feet and dragged him along in their flight.

"Monsters – ores, ogres! They're everywhere!" wailed the assessor. "I saw them attacking the people, the women, even the little children. They – they simply tore them to pieces!"

"Stop it, man!" Cordell barked. "Just worry about getting away, getting to somewhere safe!"

But this testimony to the savagery of the monsters of the Viperhand made him wonder if there could be anyplace safe left to them. As if to emphasize his fear, bands of ores, ogres, and trolls snapped at the fringes of the crowd.

Then they reached the shore of the lake. Cordell vaguely recognized the dark, brackish water called Lake Qotal. But now its surface tossed chaotically, too turbulent by far to bear the passage of any canoe.

Hoxitl tossed back his huge, maned head and howled his rage at the skies, his widespread maw revealing long, wickedly curving fangs. He stomped a massive foot, sending cracks shooting outward through the ground. Around him stretched the wreckage of the pyramid.

"You have betrayed me!" he cried, though the words made sense to him alone. All others heard the yapping and snarling of a savage beast. He shrieked his fury at his god, sensing Zaltec's weakness even as he saddled him with blame.

"You, Zaltec! I curse you and your name!" Hoxitl knew dimly that the curse that had wracked him and the members of his league was more than the work of one god, even a god of Zaltec's might. The influence of Helm, the strangers' god, could not be denied. Nor the presence of the dark punisher of the Ancient Ones, the one who had corrupted her followers even as Zaltec had twisted and deformed his own.

With a snarl of animal rage, Hoxitl tore himself from the rubble of the collapsed pyramid, rising to his full height of nearly twenty feet in the courtyard beyond. Around him, snorting and groveling, cavorted the bestial masses of his league, slaying those human warriors who still lived and had not yet fled.

The beast howled again, a shrieking, devastating sound that blasted through the ruins, causing all who heard it to stop and tremble in abject terror. Lurching forward with a rolling, lumbering gait, like an ape's, Hoxitl led his creatures through the ruins.

His eyes saw much, through the smoke and haze of destruction. And on the shore, pinned against Lake Qotal, he saw his victims. Directly, with his monstrous army following at his heels, the huge form of Hoxitl started toward Cordell and his surviving legionnaires.

Poshtli didn't sense consciousness returning as he crawled toward the mouth of the Highcave. Indeed, had he been aware, he would never have left his companions. But motivated by a kind of daze, he crept away.

Then the warrior felt the ground drop away below him. He opened his eyes and saw things with exceptional clarity, a clarity of vision he had not known in many days. He saw a rocky slab falling away, and he dimly realized that he had lain on that slab. When the mountain exploded, that stone bed had carried him high into the sky, and now he looked down upon the death of the peak below him – or was it the death of the True World itself?

He turned to the side, banking easily away from the spume of fire and ash. Poshtli soared in a great arc, slowly descending. Circling the great pillar of destruction, he flew lower and lower.

Slowly he realized the change, yet his body seemed so natural that it took him many minutes of concentration. But then he knew.

He had no fingers now – only feathers. His teeth were gone, replaced by a sharp, curving beak. Keen, bright eyes did his seeing and detected a wealth of detail that would have escaped his human vision. And his arms! His arms were wings, wings of feather and sinew – the wings of a great eagle.

How the change had occurred he couldn't know, nor did he question. It seemed only right and proper now that he should dwell in the body of a bird.

Diving toward the city, Poshtli skimmed above its blackened streets, ruined buildings, and the grotesque, deformed beasts that rampaged through the chaos. He saw it all with a dull sense of familiarity.

This had been his vision of Nexal. The darkness, the monsters, the destruction. He saw the doom of the great city, and from his serene avian detachment, he realized that the city had not been destroyed by the war waged between men.

The city died because the gods tore it apart.

The cocoon of pluma carried Hal and Erix inexorably over the dying city, settling slowly toward the earth. They saw a block of houses below them topple forward, falling into a widening canal to sink from sight in black, boiling water. A huge crevasse opened in another area, emitting a steaming column of hot gas. Dozens died before they could escape the explosive effect.

To all the death and destruction below them, the pair in their magical globe remained strangely detached. Perhaps it was because the real extent of the suffering would have driven them mad had they even begun to comprehend the true magnitude of the disaster.

They drifted like a bubble on a light breeze, falling gently toward the dark, choppy surface of a lake. A teeming crowd swarmed below them, people clamoring for safety, trapped between the brackish, marshy waters and the dying city. They saw the horrifying approach of a bestial army, the monsters of the Viperhand.

Halloran clung to Erix, wondering what would happen when their cocoon of protection struck the water. Would they sink? Would the water boil around them?

But as the Cloak of One Plume touched the tops of the waves, the water suddenly ceased its thrashing. Hal and Erix settled onto a solid surface, rough and uneven but unquestionably firm.

"Ice!" Hal exclaimed as the cloak collapsed around them. "The lake's frozen solid!"

Erixitl looked at him with that same dazed expression. "The coming of Summer Ice," she whispered. "The third sign of the return of Qotal."