Ричард Кнаак - The Veiled Prophet

Nothing moved…save him, naturally.

His head pounded with the knowledge that he had the power to do what even the Burning Hells or the High Heavens could not. He was more than merely Sanctuary’s savior; he was the god that Inarius had believed himself.

Uldyssian eyed the combatants. Raising his hands again, this time with the palms open, he willed the angels and demons to be pushed back.

They were, but the effort took more than he expected. Stubborn and certain that the power was within him, Uldyssian fought to gain what he desired. The ground trembled, and even the sky shook as if it were about to crack in two, but the angels and demons were at last separated from his edyrem.

“No more,” he thundered to the still figures. “No more.”

Uldyssian glanced at the demons. He made a slicing motion with his hand and sent the hordes tumbling back. Demons ten times his height bounced helplessly along the ruined land, bounced until they and all their brethren reached the portals through which they had come.

The son of Diomedes willed them back through those portals, forcing them to return to the Burning Hells. The demons had no choice. Although released from the spell that had frozen them, they now scrambled uselessly for some handhold. Within seconds, the only signs of the horde’s presence were the tattered bits of the slaughtered.

And then Uldyssian turned his attention to the angels. However, as he did, he thought he felt a faint voice call out to him from beyond. There was no creature, though, to whom he cared to listen. This was his domain; the interests of any other were nothing to him.

So far from where he stood, the Heavenly Host appeared like nothing more than gnats. Uldyssian could scarcely believe that he had ever been frightened of them. He inhaled, then blew the winged warriors back through the rip in the sky. A childlike glee filled the onetime farmer as he watched the pristine battle lines jumble together and the angels pass through the tear in tangled heaps.

Uldyssian.

There came the voice again, and this time he recognized it. The dragon, Trag’Oul. Yet, although the being was no enemy of his, the son of Diomedes saw no reason to acknowledge the creature’s call. Trag’Oul had failed to protect Sanctuary; he had no more say than anyone else about what Uldyssian would do with his world.

The ground shook once more. Annoyed, Uldyssian demanded that it stop. It did…and then shook anew.

He threw his power into insisting that the tremor cease. This time, all was as it should be.

At that point, Uldyssian turned to face the two remaining angels, but Tyrael was gone. Only Inarius remained.

Ignoring the other angel’s abrupt departure, Uldyssian confronted the trapped Prophet. “Your kind called us abominations,” the human said. “What do you say now?”

Inarius, though, remained silent—and that left the son of Diomedes more unsettled. Although the renegade angel wore his true form and thus had no discernible expression, at that moment, Uldyssian could have sworn that Inarius was quietly laughing at the mortal.

The certainty of this drove Uldyssian to greater fury. The sphere crackled, blue lightning striking inside. Clearly in agony, Inarius fell to his knees…but the sense that he laughed continued.

Uldyssian would have punished him again for his impudence, but a new and more powerful tremor rattled the land for as far as he could sense, reaching even to distant Kehjan and far beyond. He glanced at Inarius but could detect no manner by which the Prophet could have caused it.

Deciding that origin did not matter, Uldyssian focused his power on the new quake and willed it to be gone.

Instead, though, it more than doubled in strength. As that happened, the sky turned a dark crimson, the constantly shifting clouds looking like stirred blood.

He glanced back at Inarius. “What’ve you done? Tell me!”

The angel finally spoke. I HAVE DONE NOTHING.

A huge fissure opened up just to the south. It ran a ragged but steady course toward the capital. Another ripped open to Uldyssian’s right.

A third erupted near the edyrem.

Reacting instinctively, Uldyssian used his gifts to force the last fissure to seal. The effort nearly caused him to pass out, and worse, while he sought to recover, the tremor turned more and more violent. He could feel his followers’ growing fear, and although he tried to quiet the land around them, it instead began heaving up and down and ripping apart.

Pulse pounding, Uldyssian threw his will into bringing order, but the opposite again happened. The ground beneath began to collapse. He leapt aside just in time.

As the son of Diomedes watched, what was left of the Cathedral of Light vanished into the depths. Inarius’s sphere was swallowed along with it, the captive angel passively staring at Uldyssian as he dropped into the carnage.

Uldyssian stood stunned, unsure of what to do anymore. Sanctuary was coming apart around him—and there was nothing he could do about it. He could not understand why, either. With his astounding power, he had routed both the High Heavens and the Burning Hells so easily, yet now some dread force was doing what he had feared would come of their struggle. If not Inarius, though, what was the cause? There was no great magical force that Uldyssian could sense that was capable of all this new calamity.

Battling his own rising fear at the same time as he did the swelling cataclysm, Uldyssian cast a sweeping spell over all that existed on Sanctuary. He would have order. He would have the world restored.

Instead, he watched in horror as the grasslands to the south rose high. A shifting mound formed, swelled into a huge, earthen bubble, and then exploded with volcanic fury. In the sky above, the clouds began to spin in an ever-tightening maelstrom that set into motion the first hints of what looked to be a colossal whirlwind. Bolts of blue lightning darted down over the city and the jungle.

And only then did Uldyssian understand that he was the reason for all this. Not Inarius. Not the hosts of the High Heavens or the bestial horde of the Burning Hells.

He, Uldyssian ul-Diomed, was responsible for Sanctuary’s imminent annihilation.

It was so clear to him now. Uldyssian could feel his heart pounding, his blood racing. It was as if he were two men in one. There was that part of him that still tried to think coherently, that tried to find focus and solutions.

But there was the more primal Uldyssian, the one who had watched loved ones slaughtered and entire lands razed. The one who had been seduced by a demoness, then stripped of his trust in everything because of her. The one who had watched betrayal after betrayal take place when all he had ever wanted was peace for all.

How often in the recent past had he lashed out unthinkingly? How often had his power, not Uldyssian himself, controlled events? Driven by his basest emotions, it had finally grown beyond his conscious control. It now lashed out at Sanctuary, at the world that would not become as he so badly wanted it. It was an unthinking, unfocused eruption of magic, and as such, it could only cause more chaos, more destruction.

And each time he had sought to create order, he had also unwittingly fed into that part of him that was fear, anxiety, anger…every dark emotion. He had been fighting himself—and losing more and more with each attempt.

Uldyssian stood there, unable to react. He wanted to save the world, but already his attempt to do so had unleashed such forces throughout it that he feared to try once more would finally destroy it utterly. Yet if the son of Diomedes did nothing, the same tragic results would take place, regardless.

He felt the edyrem awaiting their terrible end. Kehjan, too, radiated a terrible hopelessness as the city at last took notice of the disaster swiftly approaching it. Uldyssian felt the terror of the jungle dwellers, of the Ascenians, as his own kind were called, and of people in lands far, far away. He sensed both men and beasts preparing for what they were certain was their doom.