32

"Stralchus, wait! We don't even know where we are."

The mystic's wild eyes fill with despair, and he says, "I know exactly where I am, Mexihcatl! Exactly!" He keeps the pistol, an unfamiliar weapon crafted in the forges of the Ziggurat, pointed at your heart, but he doesn't fire. "But we might still have a chance. I am a reasonable man, after all." His eyes tell a different story. "Maybe we can work together. Especially against him."

A tall figure steps out of the fog, one you know only by reputation. Hugely muscled, skin broken and distorted by crude parodies of a Painted Guardian's tattoos, the champion of the False Icon called the Crowned Serpent leers down at you. He cradles a spear of his own in massive hands. You understand his name when you see the bony ridge atop his skull with its horned peaks and the scales that mark his face and shoulders. What did the ophidians do to this human?

"This is it," the Crowned Serpent says. He barely parts his lips, and you wonder if you're hearing him or the False Icon itself or if a distinction can even be drawn. "This is the promised world. The world to come."

"A dead world!" Stralchus cries, waving his hands so his Ziggurat-made robe flaps like a street preacher's. He glances at you, as if in appeal, though he was pointing a gun at you a moment ago. "This is what will be left if the False Icon reaches the world of the past."

He gestures grandly with his left hand while hiding his pistol under the right sleeve of his robe.