And so the Alorn clan-chiefs drew lots, and regardless of what Polgara may think, I did not tamper with the outcome. In my view, one clan-chief was almost the same as any other, and I really didn’t care who won – just as long as somebody did. As luck had it, the clan-chief who won was Chaggat, the ultimate great-grandfather of Cherek Bear-shoulders, the greatest king the Alorns have ever had. Isn’t it odd how those things turn out? I’ve since discovered that while I didn’t tamper and neither did Belar, something else did. The talkative friend Garion carries around in his head took a hand in the game. He was the one who selected Cherek’s ancestor to be the first King of the Alorns. But I’m getting ahead of myself – or had you noticed that?
Once the question of leadership had been settled, the Alorns started moving in a surprisingly short period of time – although it’s not all that surprising, if you stop and think about it. The Alorns of that era were semi-nomadic in the first place, so they were always ready to move on – largely, I think, because of their deep-seated aversion to orderliness. Prehistoric Alorns kept messy camps, and they found the idea of moving on to be far more appealing than the prospect of tidying up.
Anyway, we marched south, passing through the now-deserted lands of the Arends and the Tolnedrans. It was about midsummer when we reached the country formerly occupied by the Nyissans. We began to exercise a certain amount of caution at that point. We were getting fairly close to the northern frontier of the Angaraks, and it wasn’t very long before we began to encounter small, roving bands of the Children of Torak.
Alorns have their faults – lots of them – but they are good in a fight. It was there on the Angarak border that I first saw an Alorn berserker. He was a huge fellow with a bright red beard, as I recall. I’ve always meant to find out if he might have been a distant ancestor of Barak, Earl of Trellheim. He looked a lot like Barak, so there probably was some connection. At any rate, he outran his fellows and fell single-handedly on a group of about a dozen Angaraks. I considered the odds against him and started to look around for a suitable grave-site. As it turned out, however, it was the Angaraks who needed burying after he finished with them. Shrieking with maniacal laughter and actually frothing at the mouth, he annihilated the whole group. He even chased down and butchered the two or three who tried to run away. The children of the Bear-God, of course, stood there and cheered.
Alorns!
The frothing at the mouth definitely concerned my companion, though. It took me quite some time to persuade her that the red-bearded berserker wasn’t really rabid. Wolves, quite naturally, try to avoid rabid creatures, and my little friend was right on the verge of washing her paws of the lot of us.
Our encounters with the Children of the Dragon-God grew more frequent as we drew nearer and nearer to the High Places of Korim, which at that time was the center of Angarak power and population. We managed to obliterate a fair number of walled Angarak towns on our way south, and the reports filtering in from our flanks indicated that the other races involved in our assault on Torak’s people were also destroying towns and villages as we converged on Korim.
The engines devised by Belmakor and Beldin worked admirably, and our customary practice when we came on one of those walled towns was to sit back and lob boulders at the walls for a few days while my brothers and I raked the place with tornadoes and filled the streets with illusory monsters. Then, when the walls had been reduced to rubble and the inhabitants to gibbering terror, we’d charge in and kill all the people. I tried my best to convince Chaggat that it was really uncivilized to slaughter all those Angaraks and that he ought to give some consideration to taking prisoners. He gave me that blank, uncomprehending stare that all Alorns seem born with and said, ‘What for? What would I do with them?’
Unfortunately, the barbarians we accompanied took to Belsambar’s notion of burning people alive enthusiastically. In their defense, I’ll admit that they were the ones who actually had to do the fighting, and somebody who’s on fire has trouble concentrating on the business at hand. Quite often Chaggat’s Alorns would batter down a wall and rush into a town where all the inhabitants had already burned to death. That always seemed to disappoint the Alorns.
In his defense, I must say that Torak finally did mount a counter-attack. His Angaraks came swarming out of the Mountains of Korim like a plague, and we met them on all four sides. I don’t like war; I never have. It’s the stupidest way imaginable to resolve problems. In this case, however, we didn’t have much choice.
The outcome was ultimately a foregone conclusion. We outnumbered the Angaraks by about five to one or better, and we annihilated them. Go someplace else to look for the details of that slaughter. I don’t have the stomach to repeat what I saw during those awful two weeks. In the end, we drove them back into the High Places of Korim and began our inexorable advance on Torak’s ultimate stronghold, that city-temple that surmounted the highest peak. Our master frequently exhorted his brother to return the Orb, pointing out to him that his Angaraks verged on extinction, and that without his children, Torak was nothing. The Dragon-God wouldn’t listen, however.
The ruggedness of the terrain on the eastern slopes of the mountains of Korim had forced the Marags and Nyissans to make their approach from the south. Had it not been for that, the disaster which followed would have been far worse.
It was the prospect of losing all of his children that ultimately drove the Dragon-God over the line into madness. Faced with the choice of either surrendering the Orb or losing all of his worshipers, Torak, to put it bluntly, went crazy. The madness of man is bad enough, but the madness of a God? Horrible!
Driven to desperation, my Master’s brother took that ultimate step which only his madness would have suggested to him. He knew what would happen. There is no way that he could not have known. Nonetheless, faced with the extermination of all of Angarak, he raised the Orb. His control of my Master’s Orb was tenuous at best, but he raised it all the same.
And with it, he cracked the world.
The sound was like no sound I’d ever heard before – or have heard since. It was the sound of tearing rock. To this very day I still start up from a sound sleep, sweating and trembling, as the memory of that dreadful sound echoes down to me through five millennia.
The Melcenes, who are quite competent geologists, described what really happened to the world when Torak broke it apart. My own studies confirm their theories. The core of the world is still molten, and that primeval protocontinent, which we all thought so firm, actually floated on that seething underground sea of liquid rock, not unlike a raft.
Torak used the Orb to break the strings that held the raft together. In his desperation to save his Angaraks, he split the crust of that huge land-mass apart so that the rest of mankind could not complete the destruction of his children. The crack he made was miles wide, and the molten rock from far below began to spurt up through that awful chasm. In itself, that would have been catastrophic enough – but then the sea poured into the newly created fissure. Believe me, you don’t want to spill cold water on boiling rock!
The whole thing exploded!
I would not even venture to guess how many people died when that happened – half of mankind at the very least, and probably far more. Had the geography of eastern Korim been more gentle, the Marags and Nyissans would in all probability have drowned or wound up living in Mallorea. At any rate, the world we had known ended in that instant.
Torak paid a very dear price for what he had done, however. The Orb was not at all happy to be used in the way he used it. Belsambar had been right. Torak had seen fire in his future, and the Orb gave him fire. As it happened, he raised the Orb with his left hand, and after he cracked the world, he didn’t have a left hand anymore. The Orb burned it down to cinders. Then, as if to emphasize its discontent, it boiled out his left eye and melted down the left side of his face just for good measure. I was ten miles away when it happened, and I could hear his shrieks as clearly as if he’d been standing next to me.
The really dreadful part of the whole business lies in the fact that, unlike humans, the Gods don’t heal.