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Legaba’s Realm lay silent and inert. Its sky was like the inside of a leaden bowl: gray, flat and featureless. Its sourceless light had grown so dim that the landscape it illuminated was almost invisible, shrouded in a shadowy pall like the overhanging smoke from some massive, cataclysmic conflagration, or a fog that encompassed the entire world.
The trees that dotted the endless swamp drooped like gigantic, wilted flowers. Their branches hung even lower than they had before; some of them snapping off and falling, then floating aimlessly in fetid water. A colorless scum rimed the swamp’s surface. Occasionally, bubbles would rise in the water, as though something underneath was struggling to breathe. Those bubbles were the only indication of life in all the dreary the dreary vistas of Legaba’s Realm. His Children ... the crocodiles, the serpents, the hordes of spiders ... had all vanished after Almovaar’s departure. The Spider God was alone.
Legaba himself had remained motionless beneath the shattered remnants of the trees that had once surrounded him like a palisade. Now, only jagged stumps remained. The fragments of their trunks and limbs had long since drifted away or sunk to the bottom of the swamp.
The Spider God had greatly diminished in size. Before, his bulk would have dwarfed even that of an elephant in the Beyond World. However, his losing battle against Almovaar had reduced his substance to an irregularly-shaped sphere about the size of a buffalo.
Legaba’s innumerable tentacles were gone. The eight crimson stars that were his eyes no longer shone, leaving him as monochromatic as a piece of shale. Almovaar’s lattice of golden fire, which had ensnared Legaba and rendered him helpless, had disappeared soon after its work was done. Still, the foreign deity’s power left its traces behind in the form of lines scored deep into the crust of Legaba’s surface. The effect was ironically similar to that of the web-like scars that his worshippers had etched into their skin.
Despite the ruin of his domain, Legaba was far from dead. But he was as dormant as a deity can become. He cared nothing for the decay that surrounded him; he was hardly even aware of it. His consciousness had become dim as an ember. There was no fuel left to sustain it. The most powerful among his worshippers, Jass Imbiah and the huangi, had all perished. The survivors scattered on the islands were too weak to engage his attention, and even if they were strong enough, he could not have answered their callings. And he had no more will to allow his Children to live. Now, all Legaba could do was dream.
He dreamed of what could have been ... what should have been ...what would certainly have been, had it not been for the intervention of that accursed alien deity, Almovaar ...
He dreamed of the triumph of Retribution Time: his worshippers overrunning the mainland, conquering, burning, killing all who resisted and enslaving the survivors, tearing down the monuments to the other Jagasti ...
He dreamed of walking the world again, while the other gods continued to cringe fecklessly in their Realms ...
He dreamed of the day when he would be the god of all the people of the Abengoni continent, his image scarred into everyone’s skin ...
One of Legaba’s eyes flared into life as those images filled his consciousness. The charred surface of his body rippled, as though something was stirring underneath, and he was on the verge of awakening. Then the scarlet blaze winked out again. And the defeated deity continued to dream.