Throughout the City of Jerusalem, the people sleep, but their minds are full of images and their slumber is fitful. They dream of horrors which lie beneath them, rotting. The festering worms of rage and malice and envy and pain roil around a heart of decaying tissue which throbs in a labored and uneven beat. Decay has set into the bones of the once-great city and while its raw power has never slackened, its quality has deteriorated. The doom awaiting them from their festering corpse metropolis looms over their unwitting futures.

Not all is doom and decay.

For the 41st evening, the History of the Holy War Part 1 has played to sold out crowds. Several magical mirrors have been sold which, on command, show the owner the entire play with sound! This has become a favorite plaything of the bourgeois from the Islands. Of course, the rarest, those created by the playwright himself, are the most coveted of all.

In the north of the city, a flicker and then a flash of white light is followed by a sound like leather tearing. One hundred and fifty gunslingers with their servants step out of the rend in reality. Under Marshall's command, they fan out to stake claim on what was once theirs.

Henriet and Talaraesae watch over the evening classes. Young men and women, soon to be Bluearms practice together. Under their new leader, they are learning to fight even more cohesively than before. Weaving among them are golden-armored elves who speak rarely, but with the direct clarity of instruction. With a final thrust of their spears, the group of youngsters who made their pledge not a month ago has completed their combat form for the first time with perfect unity. Henriet and Tal quietly toast the success with their teacups and a nod.

It is very late and the polls have been closed for hours. The barrels containing the Mayoral votes have all been weighed and tallied and Morphail Allegron is not sure whether he should be relieved or terrified. Maybe a bit of both. Perhaps, he thinks, the job of Mayor will help him take his mind off the suicide of his beloved.

The darkness of the night is palpable. Summer is drawing to a close and the bite of fall is in the air. For the first time in centuries, that bite has the sweet aroma of fall leaves drifting in from the East. A breeze picks up out of the mountains and rolls across the rolling hills and the plains, and through the sighing forests just outside the city's walls which had all grown in less than a month. The breeze hoots through a bombed-out section of the city just on the edge of what was West Golgotha and the Canal District.

Something awakens.

Beneath the broken streets and hollow, skull-like buildings, the heart of The City thuds. Its pace quickens. Still irregular. Still sick. But awake. The terrain shifts. A moan. A long, tortured moan. Several buildings are unable to handle the movement beneath them and they begin to collapse like a man-made landslide. Before they can be crushed to dust by their own weight, however, they begin to move against gravity and pull in on themselves. Walls and streets and all manner of bracken pull towards a single point at the epicenter of the shaking. A dull glow emanates from within the hulking pile of debris, as does a growl.

With a sudden lurch, the hulk rises up in the shape of a monstrous, blocky head and upper torso. The creature's raspy breathing is like heavy stones rolling in water. It screams with madness and rage as it begins to tear into the nearby buildings. The massive creature takes huge mouthfuls of architecture and grinds it into dust. It lurches southwest, a rolling heap of death, leaving a swath of destruction behind it.

Meanwhile, a black-robed figure appears before you, a scythe is balanced in its cadaver-white right hand. The weapon is like a tear in the fabric of space. It is nothing yet it is something. It is pure. It is not. It is a fitting implement for the endless creature that is its master. It does not speak. That's when you feel the rumbling beneath you. You hear the screams of thousands of terrified citizens both near and far. And beneath it all, faintly, as if you are meant to hear it regardless of the din surrounding you, is a long and urgent howl. That howl is somehow familiar...