Arkfall changed everything.
Those who witnessed and survived the event claimed that the cataclysmic impact of the Ark somehow preceded the Ark, that the great golden vessel dropped no quicker than an apple into the flash and upheaval of an earlier, far more tumultuous strike. The sound blew around the World. Chroniclers from as far as Cil-Aujas record a tremendous crack, a noise that scrambled still waters, struck dust from mortices.
The flash blinded, the concussion deafened. Ground-quakes killed tens of thousands in the Mansion Deep. Those on the surface sought refuge in the Mansion, even as those in the Mansion battled to reach the surface. A conflagration expanded as a bubble of soap, an inferno flying on a perfect arc, consuming all land and sky in charring fire. Only those caught within the wrecked underworld Manse were saved.
Mountains were thrown up. Forests were levelled where not vaporized altogether. All that had thrived was either struck dead, or left stricken. A dozen tribes of Men vanished. The World burned for a thousand leagues in all directions, engulfing Ishori?l, and reddening the skies as far away as Si?l.
As the Is?phiryas relates, Nin’janjin appealed to Cu’jara Cinmoi, whom he hated, such were the straits of the Sons of Viri:
The Sky has cracked into potter’s shards,
Fire sweeps the compass of Heaven,
The beasts flee, their hearts maddened,
The trees fall, their backs broken.
Ash has shrouded all sun, choked all seed,
The Halaroi howl piteously at the Gates,
Dread Famine stalks my Mansion.
Brother Si?l, Viri begs your pardon.
But Cu’jara Cinmoi, who prized vengeance before honour, shut his heart and his Mansion against his cousin. And so cruelty begot wickedness, and betrayal, betrayal. Nin’janjin and the surviving Viroi turned to the Ark. Wars raged. The Inchoroi forged weapons out of perverted life. A darker epoch passed, and Viri became but another name for folly and sorrow, the first and some say the deepest grave in the long shadow that the Inc?-Holoinas has cast over this World.
When so much is so mad, what can become of proportion?
The Raft swept out over the Misty Sea, its deck crammed with Swayali witches wrapped in their golden billows, and Saubon’s householders, freighted for armour, bristling with arms. They seemed a motley band, the Knights of the Desert Lion, but no Believer-King could boast a more deadly collection of souls.
The World swayed and levelled about the platform’s beam. Saubon caught himself peering at his Lord-and-Prophet the same hunted way Proyas had the day previous, a look that did not so much seek to see as to solve, as though the image were a cipher revealing less invisible and more terrifying things. He tore his gaze away, glimpsed a naked white carcass, Man or Sranc, lurching in the black swells.
What was this adolescent mooning?
One does not clutch at ribbons tripping down a stair. Men reach for what is stronger—and that is simply the way. They flail for what is slow and great to better brace themselves against madness of the small and quick. Proyas had been overthrown for the same reason the sight of the Horde so offended the heart: for want of something greater that was not insane.
A meaning so vast as to be empty, so slow as to be dead.
A Frame.
But everything was quick and everything was small and only distance or delusion made it seem otherwise. What was the Horde if not the manifestation of this, the way obscenities could be piled upon obscenities and still be desired, even craved?
Proof that one can eat and shit one’s frame.
Unlike Proyas, Saubon had always expected as much of the World. In a perverse sense, his Lord-and-Prophet’s confessions had not so much overthrown as confirmed his faith. That Kellhus was small and that Kellhus was quick in no way altered the fact that he was so much the stronger. The haloed man soaring backward into the gnawed monstrosity of Antareg had conquered the Three Seas. No matter what he was, he was greater than any martial soul to have trod good green earth. No matter what he was, he was Anas?rimbor Kellhus. The more Saubon had pondered it, the more it seemed that he had not so much believed the words as the power—the thing that could not be denied. The conquests of Anas?rimbor Kellhus were the only revelations that mattered, the only truths posterity could examine. As he had said to Proyas, who else should hew their future?
The hand of Triamis. The heart of Sejenus. The intellect of Ajencis. Kellhus dwarfed all other souls. It was that simple.
So why did he harbour this horror within him … the sense of hands too frail to fist?
The World abruptly dipped and rolled, taking his purloined stomach with it.
And there it was, floating up around the poised form of Anas?rimbor Kellhus, before sinking below the line of the Raft.