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  That prompted a rare smirk from Drahar. “A theory. The Abyss is the void in the chaotic realms beyond our world.” At Tharson’s blank expression—Drahar had to remind himself that, while Tharson was one of the finer military minds in Athas, he had no training in the Way—the sirdar added, “There are—theoretically—many realms beyond our own. The Abyss is like an open wound across them all.” He shuddered. “It’s a horrible place.”

  “How’s that? A wound in reality?”

  Drahar blinked. He thought that an odd question for Tharson to ask—but, again, he had little training. “And in theory—it’s a mad chasm of entropy. The Abyss is a void of sorts, yes, but it’s also a presence—a death urge capable of devouring the world if left unchecked. The triumph of chaos over order is what they tell us.” Another smirk, as he recalled several lecture-hall discussions that quickly degenerated into arguments. “Or the triumph of order over chaos, depending on who you ask.”

  “They?” asked Tharson with a thoughtful sip from his tankard.

  “Exactly.”

  “And you think that one bears its mark?” The templar pointed at Mandred, who was facing off against a half-giant.

  The roar of the crowd muted Drahar’s response, and he found himself, for the first time in his life, fascinated by what was going on in the arena.

  Having no clue as to what constituted good technique, Drahar simply watched what looked to him like incredibly graceless stumbling about. The half-giant had tufts of hair all over his body, which were only slightly more attractive than the pustules that ravaged Mandred’s flesh.

  They were circling each other at first, and then the half-giant lunged.

  He crashed right into Mandred, who barely even seemed to notice.

  Mandred just smiled and swung his fist downward onto the half-giant’s head like a hammer.

  The half-giant fell to the floor, either unconscious or dead. Drahar couldn’t really tell, and also didn’t really care.

  THE ABYSSAL PLAGUE

  ORIGIN

  The Gates of Madness

  JAMES WYATT

  PRELUDE

  The Mark of Nerath

  BILL SLAVICSEK

  THE PLAGUE STRIKES

  DUNGEONS & DRAGONS

  The Temple of Yellow Skulls

  DON BASSINGTHWAITE

  Oath of Vigilance

  JAMES WYATT

  August 2011

  FORGOTTEN REALMS

  Sword of the Gods

  BRUCE CORDELL

  Shadowbane

  ERIK SCOTT DE BIE

  September 2011

  DARK SUN

  Under the Crimson Sun

  KEITH R. A. DECANDIDO

  DUNGEONS & DRAGONS

  UNDER THE CRIMSON SUN

  ©2011 Wizards of the Coast LLC

  All characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. Any reproduction or unauthorized use of the material or artwork contained herein is prohibited without the express written permission of Wizards of the Coast LLC.

  Published by Wizards of the Coast LLC

  DUNGEONS & DRAGONS, D&D, DARK SUN, WIZARDS OF THE COAST, and their respective logos are trademarks of Wizards of the Coast LLC in the U.S.A. and other countries. Other trademarks are property of their respective owners.

  Cover art by Justin Sweet

  Map by Robert Lazzaretti

  eISBN: 978-0-7869-5918-1

  U.S., CANADA, EUROPEAN HEADQUARTERS

  ASIA, PACIFIC, & LATIN AMERICA Hasbro UK Ltd

  Wizards of the Coast LLC Caswell Way

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  Visit our web site at www.wizards.com

  v3.1

  For W and T

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Primary thanks go to Fleetwood Robbins, my editor at Wizards of the Coast, who first got in touch with me and said, “Hey, how’d you like to write a D&D novel?” Secondary thanks to my agent who said, “Yeah, you should write that D&D novel.” Tertiary thanks to GraceAnne Andreassi DeCandido and Tina Randleman, who both read over the first draft and said, “Yeah, that D&D novel isn’t half bad.”

  Additional thanks to Wrenn Simms, Neal Levin, and Dale Mazur, for various bits of kibbitzing and assistance, and to John Rogers and Tony Jordan, as well as their crack writers, for significant inspiration. Thanks to the menagerie for helping me write by lying around and being fuzzy and cute: Newk, Rhi, Belle, Sterling, and Scooter.

  And finally, thanks to all the folks I’ve gamed with over the years: Billy Coffey, Albert Crescenzo, John S. Drew, Michael Fichera, Dave Finnerty, Marina Frants, Judy Furnari, Elizabeth Glover, Leigh Grossman, Orenthal V. Hawkins, Michael W. Kiernan, Andrea K. Lipinski, Lesley McBain, and a whole lot of other people whom I’m forgetting because it was twenty years ago now (God, I’m old). Thank you all.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Map

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Beneath a crimson sun lie wastelands of majestic desolation and cities of cruel splendor, where sandal-clad heroes battle ancient sorcery and terrible monsters. This is Athas, the world of the Dark Sun, a dying planet of savagery and desolation. Sand, rock, sun, burning heat—these are the only properties that Athas possesses in abundance. Every living creature in the world works constantly to obtain food and safeguard water. Hunters might go days without finding suitable prey, and herders must drive their flocks from place to place to find good grazing. Water is scarce in the known regions of Athas, and those who control life-giving wells or springs jealously guard access to such riches.

  City dwellers enjoy more security than do nomads or villagers living in the deserts, but it takes legions of workers—most of them slaves—toiling in the fields to support a city’s population. Great and terrible sorcerer-kings rule the city-states, each a long-lived tyrant who crushes dissent. Rapacious nobles, corrupt templars, ruthless merchants, and legions of brutal soldiers profit from or support the sorcerer-kings’ reigns, while the common folk groan under unjust laws and harsh taxation. Slaves survive only as long as they can earn one more day’s worth of food and water with their backbreaking toil. For most people, life is a choice between struggling to survive in the wasted wilderness or trading freedom for the relative safety of the oppressive city-states.

  This is Athas, a world of cruelty and tyranny, a place of savage beauty and barbaric splendor—a world of heroes.

  PROLOGUE

  When you’re immortal, you literally have all the time in the world to craft and implement plans. If one plan fails, it matters little, for there is plenty of time to try another.

  But when there is no way to bring the plans to fruition, it becomes the worst prison an immortal could endure.

  No doubt when two gods, Pelor and Ioun, imprisoned a third, Tharizdun, in a desolate void, they had thought it to be doubly devastating.
The Chained God had eternity to plot and plan, and eternity to sit in frustration.

  And indeed, Tharizdun had come up with dozens, thousands, millions of plans to make his escape. Each was brilliant in its own way, clever and sublime.

  And each was wholly unworkable, because there was nothing else in that endless deserted wasteland. The Chained God had investigated the universe quite thoroughly, used all the means at his disposal to find something amidst the endless wastes.

  He found nothing.

  He knew it was fruitless to keep searching, but while he had nothing to work with, he also had nothing better to do.

  So he sought something, anything besides himself.

  It was impossible to tell how long he had been there. Even when he had been among the revered gods, Tharizdun had rarely concerned himself with the passage of time. That was a concern of the mortal coil. What did he care about the march of history when he was unaffected by it? He did not age, did not change, but was constant regardless.

  Yet even the markers that mortals used were denied him there. There were no suns or moons to rise and fall, no celestial bodies to orbit one another in measurable sequence.

  Were he mortal, he would have long since gone mad and died.

  But Tharizdun was a god, so such luxuries were denied him.

  Ioun and Pelor had probably thought that particular universe to be a fitting prison. After all, Tharizdun had opened the Living Gate and later unleashed the Abyss on the universe. He had hoped to wreak death and destruction—the very same that was inflicted upon the universe to which he’d been exiled.

  But, as usual, his fellow gods missed the point. They always did.

  To Tharizdun, the destruction rendered to this universe was meaningless. It wasn’t the end result that was of interest to Tharizdun, it was the process. Eventually, his home universe might be like this desolate place, but to get there, billions of years would have to pass, a near infinite number of agonies would be written on the souls of the living, chaos would overtake order in a beautiful conflagration.

  The gods that put him in his prison would see their creation rent asunder. It would be a slow, laborious, magnificent journey. An unraveling of all that had been done. And from that destruction, something new would arise in its place, something that Tharizdun had done.

  Because he had no concept of spans of time within this dead place, Tharizdun had no idea when, exactly, it was that he found the red crystalline liquid. But it was, at last, a break in the monotony of imagining what would be.

  He recognized the liquid crystal for what it was.

  Tharizdun had once used the shard of an ancient, powerful crystal to unleash the Abyss on his own universe.

  Though liquefied, this red substance he found himself standing before now derived from the same great crystal.

  It was the Progenitor of Chaos. He could feel it.

  More than that—he could hear it. The same whispery importuning to be unleashed that had come from the crystal in his own world spoke to Tharizdun now.

  Set me free, it said. Let me loose.

  “I cannot even free myself,” Tharizdun said with frustration. “Besides, your work here is done.”

  The ignominy hit him like a spell. Here he had unfettered access to the Progenitor, to the liquid crystal that embodied all the spectacular chaos that Tharizdun had tried to unleash on his own universe—and he could do nothing with it. It had done its work here and lay useless.

  As useless as Tharizdun himself was. But perhaps there was a way …

  So Tharizdun began to concentrate, to focus and project his will into the void and beyond. With enough clarity of purpose, he would be able to contact those in the world of the gods that needed him most. The disenfranchised, the downtrodden, those whose existence was most tenuous. They would hear his call and do their part. While the conscious minds of his followers were denied him, the murky veil of the dreamscape proved accessible.

  It was an imperfect method of communication. Through the dreams of his worshipers, he was able to reassure them that he did live, in an exile much like their own, and that his return would mean destruction of the structures that denied. Tharizdun could give his followers little beyond dreams, but the promises they held were powerful. And he could give them the impetus for that revolution.

  Tharizdun knew that there was a ritual that could make use of a fragment of the Living Gate to open a portal between the worlds. Tharizdun—in the company of his fellow gods—had found the Living Gate in the depths of the Astral Sea, and Tharizdun had opened it, unleashing the horrors of the Far Realm upon his home universe.

  Fragments of the Gate existed, and if Tharizdun’s worshipers performed the ritual in his abandoned dominion of Pandemonium, a tiny tear could be opened between realities.

  Tharizdun had never explored that option because the portal needed to be opened on both sides in order to break free of Pelor and Ioun’s chains.

  But he had found a tool by which to bridge the gap between universes.

  And so Tharizdun formed a hand of darkness and reached out to the red liquid. “Both of us are trapped, but together we can be free. Together, we will unleash our might upon the people of the world. And they will drown in blood.”

  The Progenitor undulated and flowed at the Chained God’s touch, encircling the darkness and bone of his form.

  It too had been alone for immeasurable time. It too hungered for purpose.

  Alone, both Tharizdun and the Progenitor were helpless. Together, they might be able to free themselves from this void.

  The Chained God combined two existing plans into a third that might, at last, bring both him and the Progenitor out of that forsaken emptiness.

  The next step was to once again pierce the gulf and speak to his worshipers through their nightmares. Or, rather, speak to one particular worshiper.

  It was always a tricky thing. From a god’s perspective, the ideal worshiper was one who did so unthinkingly. There was no devotion quite like mindless devotion, uncluttered as it was by reason.

  But Tharizdun needed a task to be performed, one that would require dedication and ingenuity and an ability to lead other devout followers in that task.

  Luckily, he did have one such follower who miraculously hadn’t been killed, nor had he—like so many others—lost their minds completely to his whispering dreams.

  And so the exiled god reached out to Albric, his most loyal follower, to tell him to travel to the ruins of Bael Turath and find a rod containing a fragment of the Living Gate.

  The imprecision of time continued to frustrate Tharizdun, but with a viable plan, a purpose, it seemed to slow to an agonizing crawl. Painfully aware of every moment that he sat, staring into the red abyss of the Voidharrow, Tharizdun waited for Albric to complete his task.

  Through his link with the human, Tharizdun could sense pieces of Albric’s progress through the murk of the gap between universes, mostly by the mortal’s emotions. The god could feel Albric’s elation at finding and seizing the rod in Bael Turath; his eagerness as he used the powers that his devotion to Tharizdun provided to travel to Pandemonium via the City of Doors; his triumph as he gathered seven more to his side.

  With each new follower Albric was able to bring to his cause, Tharizdun felt the link grow stronger, as the power of their devotion enabled him to more aggressively pierce the veil between universes, and he was able to speak directly to Albric through one of his more weak-minded devotees rather than through the vague imagery of dreams.

  The moment was coming. All of Tharizdun’s planning, all his patience, all his frustration—it was finally coming to a head. Dozens of plans and one, at last, was starting to bear fruit.

  When he felt Albric’s devotion at its greatest height, he knew it was time. A shudder passed through all of reality as Albric’s spell unleashed the power of the Gate fragment to poke through the barriers that separated universes, to force a crack.

  Reaching out with his godly might, Tharizdun sent the
liquid crystal through that crack, watching as the roiling chaos seeped through the chink in the armor that imprisoned a god, seeking out ways to sow the seeds of madness.

  Then disaster. Champions of Ioun and Pelor, along with a wizard and two fighters, interrupted the ritual even as Albric and the other seven devotees were transformed by the Voidharrow into strange creatures of madness. Tharizdun had known nothing of this, and he screamed in rage at the Progenitor. “You betrayed me.”

  But the Progenitor denied the accusation. Now we spread, your will and my substance. We are the Voidharrow.

  The Chained God saw the creatures that his eight worshipers had changed into. “Like a plague. Your substance and my will.”

  Our will.

  While the Voidharrow had pierced the veil on Tharizdun’s end, the thrice-damned heroes had closed it on the other side, leaving Tharizdun and the Progenitor trapped once again.

  But the veil had been pierced. With the Voidharrow loose, he had a foothold.

  And that was not all. The ritual Albric had led enabled the Chained God to reach out to many worlds. He could not send himself through the veil to any of those worlds—the gods had imprisoned him too well—but the Voidharrow … It could seep through the chinks in the armor that Albric’s ritual had exposed.

  If the Voidharrow spread far enough and took root in enough other worlds, it would provide the foundation of a latticework of chaos, a linkage of Abyssal force that would smash through the barriers that kept Tharizdun trapped there, allowing him to return to his own universe.

  For the first time since Ioun and Pelor trapped him in that wretched place, Tharizdun threw his head back and laughed.

  CHAPTER

  ONE

  Vas Belrik’s wife always yelled at him when he rode a family crodlu to the marketplace.