X. On What Waits Beneath

Ossoyo — the Blackfrost Whale, the Dream Leviathan — lies beneath the Nameless Spires. It has lain there since the Saume Kar sealed it away, sustained by its own vast reserves of psychic energy and by the dreams of anything foolish enough to sleep within range of its influence. It is not dead. It is not dormant, not truly — not since the Ice-Rider expedition cracked the seal several years ago. It is waiting, with the patience of something that has already waited for millennia and finds the prospect of waiting a few more years entirely manageable.

A single mote of its breath contains more psychic energy than an entire species. Its exhalations create blackfrost — processed dream matter that converts the willing and the unwilling alike into extensions of its will. It does not seek worship. It does not grant clerical powers. It simply inflicts its gifts upon those it chooses, and those it chooses do not get to decline.

The Nameless Spires are its prison, its temple, and — if Ritalsin succeeds — the point from which it will emerge into a world that has no Aqakaru to seal it away again, no Saumen Kar civilization to pay the price of containment, and no guarantee that the sacrifice that saved the world the first time can be replicated a second.

There are only a few Saumen Kar left and only one guardian. The seal is failing. There is a network of binding obelisks are being corrupted. And there is a man with a ship’s worth of experimental subjects and the unshakeable conviction that what he is doing is not merely justified but necessary, racing north to finish what a cosmic entity started five thousand years ago.