6

The fire grows solid and sluggish, then enormous, until you are once again looking at the False Icon as if it were a colossal monolith across from you on an empty plain. Its insides churn and this time it holds not signs and symbols but images.

You see Stralchus, his beard and eyes wild, leading the River People he lured away from Chief Kothis downriver. You see another village, a battle, men killing and dying. Is this happening? Has it already happened? Or is it just some phantasm? Then you see Stralchus victorious, leading…hundreds? Could it be that many? They have arrived near a lake, and Stralchus is speaking.

They will build, he says. They will build a great temple to the Icons—a Ziggurat–and from there they will build a weapon to destroy the gray mountain in the sky. And they will build with impossible speed, for the Icons are with them. Stralchus points toward something you cannot see, and his followers fall to their knees as one, and you understand that the Icons are "with" Stralchus in a more than metaphorical sense. Stralchus has…you almost…you almost understand…

Using arts that stray far from orthodoxy, Stralchus has imprisoned the Icons. He's bottled them up like a fairy-tale sorcerer with a jar full of genies. They serve him now.

The False Icon seems to be watching you, to figure out what sort of man you are when presented with something wholly unfamiliar. It seems to believe it already knows what sort of man Stralchus is.