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Mel Odom
Mel Odom
Under Fallen Stars
Forgotten Realms – The Threat from the Sea Trilogy – Book Two
1999
Prologue
Seros (The Sea of Fallen Stars)
15 Tarsakh, the Year of the Gauntlet
Flyys raked his webbed hands through the water and kicked out with his finned feet. The young triton knifed through the shallows of the ocean but knew it wasn't enough to escape his pursuers. Even though he tried not to, he glanced over his shoulder.
The morkoth swam after him. There were six of them now; too many for him to try to fight in the ocean. All of them were vaguely humanoid in shape, with bulbous heads that reminded Flyys of locathah, except for the squidlike beaks that filled their faces. The huge eyes on either side of their heads focused on him, moving independently. The dorsal fins on their backs looked like knife blades on edge.
They each had four arms, two of those arms equipped with thick pincers that identified them as the morkoth warrior class. Six tentacles flared out from their lower bodies, then pushed against the water. They looked deep purple in the light of the shallows, and iridescence flowed over them where the light struck, turning them almost pearl pale. Every now and again, the morkoth pulled the ocean brine through their gills and used it to propel themselves in the same manner as squid.
Flyys knew they could have easily overtaken him but had chosen to wear him down. His only solace was that they were evidently loathe to die capturing him. He knew he couldn't get away unless Persana chose to favor him. The Guardian of the Deep, creator of the triton people, couldn't ride with every tide, though. Sometimes those tangled nets Persana cast upon the water required sacrifices be made by his people so that greater works might be wrought. Persana was a master architect, not only of structures, but of fates as well. The young triton's belief told him this was so.
Glancing desperately at the ocean floor less than twenty feet below, Flyys searched for inspiration. Here in the shallows the morning sunlight gleamed down to the brackish silt below. Colorful fish, their hues given more life by the sun, darted in all directions as he neared them, but all of them avoided the greenish-gray claw coral mounds sprouting from the ocean bed.
The surface dwellers called the claw coral "hydra's stone" because of the seven collective offshoots that grew from its center. Sharply edged facets covered every inch of those coral fingers and even the slightest touch could open flesh to the bone. A number of the undersea races in Seros used claw coral to make weapons.
Spotting a thick copse of the claw coral ahead, Flyys turned and swam for it. Ahead lay only open water and certain capture before he could ever get out of the shallows and into deeper Seros.
Little more than five feet long, the young triton knew he wouldn't be a match for the morkoth warriors. One on one he felt confident he could have held his own, but the morkoth didn't fight that way. Flyys had heard stories that the morkoth in the outer seas lived solitary lives, much different than the morkoth who dwelled in Seros. In the Sea of Fallen Stars, they lived in the Arcanum of Olleth, on the lowest reaches of the Hmur Plateau along western Seros, a community that fought and conquered together.
