The intruder came from no direction and all directions.
He was spotted by a corpse-burner near the east gate, by a sentry at the north gate, by a pair of bickering lovers in a field outside the west gate, and a drunk out-of-work mercenary leaning against a pillar vomiting by the south gate.
There were other sightings too, several dozen in all, at different places: some at the city walls, mostly outside the city.
Animals sensed his coming and reacted. The war elephants in the great enclosures behind the city, thousands upon thousands of enormous beasts, battle veterans all, stirred uneasily, raising their trunks and lowing in alarm, alerting their mahouts and masters. The chariot horses whinnied and shied away from shadows. The milch cows mooed, white-eyed with panic. Dogs began barking and would not stop even when ordered by their masters. Babies cried for no reason.
Animals and children unfortunate enough to be birthed that night were either stillborn, though they had been alive and kicking only moments earlier, or expired shortly after birth of inexplicable causes. Strange winds sprang up, blowing dust dervishes into the houses of sleeping priests. Cows gave curdled milk. Chickens laid malformed eggs. A calf was born with two heads. Birds rose in great flocks from the trees where they slept at night and dashed themselves against stone cliffs, dying by the thousands. Food spoiled while it was cooking.
Hundreds of citizens fell ill, and those who were already ill and had been on the road to recovery relapsed and died. An ancient woman, said to be close to two hundred years of age, cried out the names of 107 urrkh demons before collapsing into a comatose sleep from which she never woke. Pundits and astrologers saw the star patterns alter before their very eyes, and could not explain the change of constellations. Other eldritch phenomena proliferated as well—marvels and portents that defied explanation.
This was only the beginning.
A darkness greater than night had descended on the City of Elephants and Snakes.
The devil walked the streets of Hastinaga.
Like all demons and gods, he was a shape shifter. He could assume any form or shape he desired. He chose to assume several, all at once, each ansh serving a different purpose, intent on individual missions.
He entered the house of a sleeping priest, stood in the simple bedchamber, and watched the elderly guru and his wife sleeping deeply. The city outside the house was restless and filled with strange sounds. The cries of elephants, horses, dogs, and cows filled the night, but in the mage’s unostentatious residence, all was quiet. The old couple slumbered peacefully on their simple cots, unaware of the terror that walked the streets—or the monster that stood within reach.
The fiend reduced himself to a mist, his solid flesh melting away suddenly as if burned by acid. In moments, only fumes remained. They settled over the mage’s bed, a cloud that enveloped both priest and wife. With each breath they took, they inhaled the noxious fumes. Both stirred restlessly in their sleep, their bodies sensing something amiss, but breath was life, and they could hardly cease breathing.
In moments, the entire cloud had been absorbed into their lungs, and from there, into their blood. It altered the very substance of their bodies, leaving them exactly the same in outward appearance, but changing them completely on the inside. They went to sleep as two individuals; by the time they woke next morning, they would be completely different people, with very different minds and missions. Yet to the world at large, they would appear no different.
The devil reduced himself to lumps of raw meat that lay in the street. Stray dogs caught the scent of it and slunk down to consume it. They wolfed it down hungrily, but even before it reached their bellies, they knew something was wrong. After eating, the dogs sniffed at each other uneasily, neither growling nor making any other sounds. In unnatural silence, they slunk away to dark corners, the backs of houses, the roofs or pits where they lay in troubled sleep, feverish and racked with chills, their fur sprouting hideous boils. They did not die, but they did not live either. They became . . . something else. Something Other.
Carrion birds swooped down to consume the flakes of meat that lay on the street; their fate was no better than that of the dogs. They slept on tree branches, heads tucked under their wings, racked by strange ailments. Their eyes glittered with manic light. Other birds of their own species avoided them, crying out loudly to alert their fellows of these diseased few.
One ansh of the stranger reduced himself to tiny spores that resembled those produced by flowering plants in bloom, and traveled on a breeze that blew through the city; the minuscule spores were inhaled by people as they slept.
Another ansh turned into a mist that rose up and condensed as moisture, which descended to fall into the water troughs of elephants, horses, camels . . .
In various ways, insidious and subtle, the stranger’s many divisions transformed themselves into rain, smoke, clouds, mist, fog, even food, and were inhaled, drunk, or eaten by people and animals in all the different parts of the city. Some of the victims were regular citizens, some rich nobles and merchants, others were midwives, the wives of priests, ladies of the court, but many were soldiers, charioteers, mahouts, archers, war marshals, generals . . .
Through that long dark night, the evil that walked on two feet insinuated himself into the bodies and minds of the people of Krushan in a horrific number of ways.
Many other strange and unnatural things occurred that night across Hastinaga. Dark shapes moved through the night, terrible acts were committed, awful things were done that could never be undone; all night the city was racked by a series of supernatural disturbances. All night the terror held sway. Those who sensed the presence of evil locked their doors, barred their windows, and stayed indoors with their loved ones. Those foolish or ignorant enough to challenge the devil that walked the streets were quickly dispatched to the netherworld of Shima, their bodies discovered the next day, horribly mutilated, faces frozen in an awful rictus of agony. All night the terror walked through the capital city of the Burnt Empire and worked its urrkh evil.
All this was only the prelude.
The real terror was yet to come.