Free Wrath of a Mad God by Raymond E. Feist Page A

and as you see them.” He waved his hand, and suddenly there appeared a distortion, as if someone had stuck a long needle through the sphere from the bottom, pushing a small part of each layer upward, until it intersected the layer above. “Then came something I can only call the Disturbance.”
    Pug glanced at his companions, but said nothing.
    Macros continued. “Like the cause of the upheaval that brought humanity to Midkemia, we’ll never know the cause of the Disturbance.”
    Nakor grinned. “Are they the same?”
    Macros frowned like an annoyed schoolteacher. “If you find out, please let me know. This Disturbance is an…imbalance, a pressure upward from the lowest to the highest realm of reality. Just as the Dasati are attempting to manifest themselves into our… your realm, so are creatures from the third realm attempting to rise up into this one.”
    “You’re describing a cataclysm of unprecedented scope,” whispered Pug.
    Macros nodded. “Yes, my friend. The entire fabric of the universe is being rent apart, and we must stop it before it gets worse.”
    “How?” asked Magnus quietly.
    Macros sighed, a very human sound coming from a Dasati.
    “I have no real knowledge, just intuition, and even that is…not compelling.” He waved his hand and the conjured sphere vanished. “The Chaos Wars appear to have been an attempt at reordering the balances within the entirety of reality, from the highest to the lowest plane. We can only speculate on what occurred in the other realms of reality, but I suspect balance was restored, else the crisis we face would be even more catastrophic. We’ve had no evidence of any interaction between your native realm, the one I used to live in as well, and the one above it, the first heaven.”
    “Because the Nameless One is imprisoned?” suggested Nakor.
    “Most likely,” said Macros. “So, the chaos comes from thelower realms. His Darkness, the Dark God of the Dasati, is so powerful in his supremacy that whatever incursions from below threatened this plane have almost certainly been dealt with.”
    “If I might ask a question?” inquired Magnus.
    “What?” asked his grandfather, barely hiding his impatience at the interruption.
    “Why here? Why Kelewan and Midkemia?”
    Macros paused, then said, “Not a bad question.” He smiled.
    “I suspect there must be a locus somewhere, or loci, where the incursions from one realm to the next manifest first, analogous to the first Tsurani rift into Midkemia, in the Grey Tower Mountains.
    “Remember, the gods of each realm are local expressions of a much vaster entity, spanning universes. The Nameless One is a manifestation of evil on an unimaginable scale, one that spans the entirety of the universe within which Midkemia resides, a universe of billions of worlds, with countless creatures on them, multitudes having visions of that evil, giving it a legion of guises. Yet, we can assume with some degree of certainty that just as the Nameless One was confined in Midkemia, so he was in many other places, the result of the conflict which seemed to center on that world.
    “I expect the farther one traveled from Midkemia, the less likely it would be that the history of the Chaos Wars remained unchanged. Remember the sphere? If you were at the extremities the ordering of the planes of existence seemed normal, unchanged. Yet if you were at the point of the incursion, you would be amid chaos.”
    “You build a persuasive argument,” said Pug. “But what I wish to know is how this applies to us, finding ourselves here?”
    Macros nodded and smiled. “To the heart of the matter.” He looked directly into Pug’s eyes. “The Nameless One is confined, but as you have witnessed, not without influence, even some power, albeit limited by the other surviving Greater Gods, the Controllers.
    “He doesn’t appreciate the incursion from ‘below’ by theDark God of the Dasati. As much as possible, he’s working in concert with the