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shock was compounded by the presence of Torak's Disciples, Zedar,
Ctuchik and Urvon. Torak was a God, and did not speak except to
issue commands. Ctuchik, Zedar and Urvon, however, were men,
and they questioned and probed and saw everything with a kind
of cold disdain. They saw immediately what Torak himself was
strangely incapable of seeing - that Mallorean society had become
almost totally secular - and they took steps to rectify that situation.
A sudden reign of terror descended upon Mallorea. The Grolims
were quite suddenly everywhere, and secularism was, in their eyes, a
form of heresy. The sacrifices, which had become virtually unknown,
were renewed with fanatic enthusiasm, and soon -not a village in all
of Mallorea did not have its altar and its reeking bonfire. In one
stroke the Disciples of Torak overturned eons of rule by the military
and the bureaucracy and returned the absolute domination of the
Grolim. When they had finished, there was not one facet of
Mallorean life that did not bow abjectly to the will of Torak.
The mobilization of Mallorea in preparation for the war with the
west virtually depopulated the continent. The Angaraks and the
Karands were eventually marched north to the land bridge crossing
to northern most Gar og Nadrak, and the Dalasians and Melcenes
moved to Dal Zerba, where fleets were constructed to ferry them
across the Sea of the East to southern Cthol Murgos. Torak's overall
strategy was profoundly simple. The northern Malloreans were to
join with the Nadraks, the Thulls and the northern Murgos for the
strike into Drasnia and Algaria; the southern Malloreans to join
forces with the southern Murgos, await Torak's command, and then
march northwesterly. The goal was to crush the west between these
two huge armies. The disaster which overtook the northern column
at Vo Mimbre was in large measure set off by the lesser-known
disaster which befell the southern forces in the Great Desert of
Araga in central Cthol Murgos. The freak storm which swept in off
the Great Western Sea in the early spring of 4875 caught the
southern Murgos, the Melcenes and the Dalasians in that vast wasteland
and literally buried them alive in the worst blizzard in recorded
history. When the storm finally abated after about a week, the
southern column was mired down in fourteen-foot snowdrifts
which persisted until early summer. And then, with a sudden rise in
temperature, the snow-melt turned the desert into a huge quagmire.
It is now quite evident that the storm and the conditions which
followed were not of natural origin. None of the various theories put
forth to explain it, however, is quite satisfactory. Whatever the cause,
the results were one of the great tragedies in human history. The
southern army, trapped in that wasteland first by snow and cold and
then by an ocean of mud, perished. The few survivors who came
straggling back at the end of the summer told tales of horror so
ghastly that they do not bear repeating.
The two-fold catastrophe which had occurred in the west,
coupled with the apparent death of Torak at the hands of the Rivan
Warder, utterly demoralized the societies of Mallorea and of the
western Angarak Kingdoms. Expecting a counter-invasion, the
Murgos retreated into fortified positions in the mountains. Thullish
society disintegrated entirely, reverting to crude village life. The
somewhat more resilient Nadraks took to the woods, and much of
the independence of the modern-day Nadrak derives from that
period of enforced self-reliance. In Mallorea, however, events took a
different course. The doddering old Emperor emerged from
retirement to reassume authority and to try to rebuild the shattered