it seemed as if the thunder’s growl was answered from deep within the earth.
The tip of the mountain shook. The ancient stone danced and then toppled. As it fell ancient spells became undone and things erupted outwards onto the mountain top, winged things that beat up into the stormy night, laughing and cackling.
A moment later a massive claw emerged, and then an arm, then a deformed bestial head and finally a monstrous androgynous body. Two additional arms pushed it from the ground.
N’Kari looked down from the mountain top for a long moment. He breathed air as he had not breathed it in six thousand years. He looked down the slopes of a great mountain illuminated by the hellish flicker of lightning. Overhead winged things soared and cackled on the storm winds. He raised one clenched fist in a gesture of triumph and defiance.
With his escape from the Vortex full cognisance of what he was and who he had been came crashing in on him. In the Vortex, he had been a pallid ghostly thing, his mind and memories dull, his passions shadowy, his desires weak and suppressed. Now that he had regained physical form once more, his emotions were stronger, as if they needed glands and hearts and blood and bone and organs to give them their full strength.
He remembered a great deal he had forgotten and felt once again the titanic towering passions that were his birthright.
He smiled, showing his fangs, and then with an impulse of his will changed his shape to something more resembling an elf, albeit one horned and fanged whose long nails were talons and whose eyes glowed like bloody fire.
In this world his will was constrained by foolish rules and the magic he worked would have to be done in accordance with them. So be it. The knowledge of what was necessary was instinctive to him. He could feel the constraints that hemmed him in in the way a man would feel walls surrounding him or the tug of gravity on his body. It took him mere moments to work out what was needed and then he inscribed a circle in the ground with his claw.
Now, he thought, I will take vengeance. It was time to locate his prey. He reached out with his mind and formed a vision of Aenarion as he had been at the height of his power.
He could recall the slightest detail of his foe and recollect him on a scale that was unimaginable to the weak minds of mortals. He remembered the exact pattern of Aenarion’s spirit and the genetic markers that had flowed in his blood and which would flow in the blood of all of those descended from him.
As the lightning blasted the ground about him, he pricked the flesh of his hand with one of his talons. A drop of his magical blood flowed forth. He flipped it into the air and ignited it with a word. It became a mote of energy, a pulse of magic that he could shape to his will.
He imprinted the genetic rune that he remembered upon it and then summoned more magical energy. As he did so the original mote divided and replicated like an amoeba, again and again and again as more power flowed into it. Soon N’Kari was surrounded by clouds of tiny motes of light, swarming around him like fireflies. With another gesture he sent them racing away from him to seek out the ones he was looking for.
The motes flew across Ulthuan fast as sunbeams, seeking the few remaining possessors of the marks that N’Kari sought. They flashed around them invisibly and then hurtled back across the vast distances to their master.
As they returned, they swirled around him once more, each of them bearing an image of the being they had found. Visions of faces and places danced in his mind. He saw young women waiting to be married, wizards in their laboratories, princes in their palaces, a pair of twins little more than children riding aboard a ship. All of them bore the unmistakeable imprint of Aenarion’s blood.
Now, N’Kari knew the locations of his prey and his tiny pets, following an invisible magical scent, would always be able to find them again.
He smiled to himself revealing very sharp fangs. One of those he was looking for dwelled not too far from here. It would not take him long to begin his revenge. Within the passing of a moon, he swore he would have wiped all