Call of Kerberos: Twilight of Kerberos, The - Jonathan Oliver Page 0,68

torment they were in.

The creatures got stiffly to their feet as they changed, their toes elongating and sprouting vicious-looking talons that dug into the seabed; their jaws shattered and then slowly reformed, their mouths now lined with long sharp teeth. As the glowing nodes fell away from the creatures' faces, Silus knew exactly what he was looking at.

Chadassa.

The newly birthed Chadassa moved through the rubble, dispatching any of the survivors too weak or gravely wounded to make the change. As they experienced their first kills, Silus could sense their joy. Part of him - for the briefest of moments - even shared in it, but he bit down on this dangerous lust, burying it deep.

See the birth of the emissaries of the Great Ocean. See the first tentative steps of your kin.

Silus wouldn't have called their steps tentative. The Chadassa strode through the broken city killing anything that was not their own kind.

Now witness the rise of the Chadassa.

A great war followed, a wave of destruction wrought across the ocean by this fledgling race, Calma city after Calma city falling to their relentless onslaught.

But there was some resistance. Through necessity the Calma had to learn the art of war, but such a talent did not come naturally to a race who had lived in peace for most of their lives. Mistakes were made, more of their cities were lost and by the time they began to fight back with anything like success, their populous had been decimated.

Some Calma, in their desperation to save themselves, crawled onto land. But they soon found their hides drying out and cracking under the onslaught of the merciless sun.

The inhabitants of Twilight decided to take mercy on them.

Silus saw the shores of Nürn strewn with the bodies of Calma. Moving amongst them were lithe figures with pale skin and almond eyes the colour of Kerberos. Silus realised that they were elves - that ancient and beautiful race that had been dead for millennia - and, as the creatures of legend began to sing, he saw the birth of the human race.

Under the influence of the elven magic the Calma began to change where they lay. Their scales lost their sheen, gaining the soft pastel colours of flesh, their limbs shortened as hands and feet began to form, their tails withdrew into their bodies, their gills closed up and their jaws realigned as hair sprouted from newly shaped skulls. All along the Twilight coast the human race took their first breath and, looking up at Kerberos, they let loose their first cry.

With the change wrought, the elves sang one last song. The song of forgetfulness.

All knowledge of their brethren in the sea was lost to the human race. They forgot the Calma - their legends and culture - and began to form their own communities. In saving them, the elves had severed their roots. But they were satisfied that they had at least partly turned the tide of genocide. Only the few Calma who remained below the waves knew the truth concerning the human race and they guarded the secret as they continued to evade the attentions of the Chadassa.

However, it didn't take long for the Chadassa to find out the truth.

Silus watched as the sea demons built their empire on the ruins of the Calma's, growing in strength and breeding with an alarming rapidity. From infants, their growth to maturity took only a couple of years, and they began to reproduce almost as soon as they had shed their youth. Soon they ruled their submarine world with a ruthless efficiency, exploiting the ocean's resources, devastating whole swathes of seabed in the building of their cities.

As the centuries passed, the Chadassa began to feel that the conquest of Twilight's seas had not been enough. Jealously regarding the land that had been denied to them, they began to mobilise for an invasion.

As they strode from the waves, however, the Chadassa found that the humans had lost the Calma's propensity for peace, and they fought with an unbridled ferocity that matched the Chadassa's own.

There was, however, an even greater impediment to the Chadassa's plans for conquest of land.

As the Chadassa fought on the surface they soon found themselves sickening. They tried to fight on, but after only a brief time their bodies' shortcomings forced them to retreat back beneath the waves.

For generation after generation my creations brooded on their inadequacies, but despite their pleas to me I could not intervene. The voice of the Chadassa god told Silus.