Exclusive Preview: Swords of the Obsidian Sea

BEFORE

Tropical winds ferried the stench of death across the sea.

It gathered at the waterline, as children are gathered by mothers at the precipice of a busy crossing. With each coming of the waves, foul air was unleashed upon the beach, up toward the crests of the dunes, and down to their troughs, and all about the placid sandy plains between. Morning tides nudged a hundred corpses toward the shore. The crabs bustled and the gulls were full.

In places ash and steam belched from the world in clouds or bled in trickles. In others, the sea had reclaimed the seething streaks of red already, put an end to their seething and turned them black as stone, turned them black with such haste that between the red and black no streak had spent a moment pink. Shouts of human agony bounded from the faces of nascent volcanic rocks; stoic in birth up and down this place of the dead.

All along the coastline debris from two ships mingled with the cadavers who had been their crews. These were the vestiges of a futile rebellion, a rebellion which had not existed but in the minds of men so short a time before, a rebellion born in earnest the day its milieu disembarked from their obedient ports for more glorious and less certain futures, and now those futures were the present, and the present is nothing if not certain, and their rebellion swirled in its component parts like filth at the brackish boundary of polluted rivers.

Stark amid the wreckage, a pearl white plank of wood read Time Itself Cannot Stand Against Me in twinkling silver script. A wave with too great a lust for shore prematurely broke, and it rolled the plank fully twice, and then half again, and it exposed an underbelly of naked wood. It was to be the first of one hundred such waves, and every wave lusted more for the shore than the last, and no wave lusted half so much as the next.

The second wave rolled the plank ten times at least, twenty times perhaps. The third flipped the plank, it's sure, a hundred times, pearl white to plain wood, end over end, and even as the plank rolled the sea laid claim to quite nearly half the beach. A fourth brushed the roots of the palm trees at its upper boundary. By the fifth the dunes were pools, and the plains were a shallow tapered gateway to vast and hellish seas, and the plank was not so much a plank as a million half white splinters, a million half white pieces of a puzzle never to be reconciled.

Between the waves that followed, all the crinkled ends of all the tallest branches were conquered, and the limbs of men were tangled throughout, the limbs at least that weren't yet too rigid for tangling. If there were a soul about, she will have been reasonable in assuming the sea would swallow the island altogether in time, perhaps with the next wave. Surely with the wave after that.

She will have been reasonable, but she will have been wrong, for after a hundred waves the sea retreated, and the swells abruptly stopped.

Through the amber tinted haze that daily graces the shore at sunrise appeared a titanic pillar of stone. It rose from the far-off brine and swept toward the nearest beach, swept half the vast distance from observer to horizon.

That observer, if she were present, if she were brave, would have noticed that the sea fell by no negligible portion of her height the instant the pillar departed it. She would have noticed then that light from the sun left the world for a time as ten thousand tons of seawater rained upon her head. If she were alive, she would have gawked when the column passed over her, trembled at the sight of a dozen trees or more flattened by its contact with solid ground, shrunk beneath the shadow of a second footfall which followed it inland, and resigned herself to a curious death when her attempt to glimpse the body above the legs betrayed nothing at all through the clouds.

With a swat, the Titan parted his fluid skirt of clouds for an unobstructed view of the conquered beach, cold stone eyes scouring for survivors. Satisfied that no man qualified, he did something uncharacteristic, he stalled, lingered where he was for the simple pleasure of it.

It was the look of this place that appealed to him, pleased him, held him, and passively he noticed that the sight stoked into relevance some quality of himself, some fragment of his ancient memory or unremembered proclivity locked or lurking in his deeper nature. Smoke choked the island's vastness, writhing like colonies of sea snakes clustered around a vent in the cold black basement of the sea. Writhed high into the sky, high enough for the Titan's notice but not half so high as his waist. Fires flirted across a gulf of trees like first loves across the river their fathers patrolled under different banners. Flags bearing his likeness poked above the canopy in the places the vegetation hadn't been cooked to cinders. Picturesque.

"There was never any question," Ottoh said. "It's just like I told you, right from the start. Separate the three, disembowel the lesser millions of any notion at all of courage. Simple as that. Separate the big, squish the little. Squish them like an orange. Bravery and morale are first to go, the juice easily had. The rest is merely a pulp to be scraped away. Motivation, memories... yearning. I needn't be alliterative to make the point. You've made the point already, haven't you? You've squeezed the juice, just about. The pulp will come of its own volition—or what remains of it."

The Titan tended implicitly to agree with that voice inside his head, and he endorsed this latest observation with a nod. Boulders which might have been asteroids fell to the earth, ending lineages of small creatures where they struck.

"Beyond those fires lies the end to all of this, you know. Beyond the fires is unity for my people. Beyond them is rest, for you. Eternal rest, if I am to guess. I know how you want for it. Of course I know." Ottoh was quiet, briefly. Contemplative. He was always that way, until he wasn't. "Beyond those fires, He will have His retribution. Hard earned and late delivered. But the two of us... We will have delivered it."

Thunderous strides cracked in moments full eons of petrified coral, divided vertically those gradients of geologic antiquity that formed the island's very bedrock. Steps best measured in miles shortly delivered the Titan to the source of the flames, and revealed to him the crowds of cheering men who'd lit them. When there were no steps left to take, where the trees succumbed to the slope of sand and the sand to a vaster sea, when the smoke had cleared and the torches were dim and the men were silenced by distance, a lonely red glow remained, and it received the Titan warmly.

Ottoh laughed his bellowing laugh. And he spoke again, his words fated as ever to live and to die as echoes in the Titan's granite skull.

"It has been a pleasure serving with you."

Miles below, confined to the space of a Titan's grip, three human beings squirmed, and awaited death, and plotted.