THE PLAGUE SPREADS

Tharizdun’s escape attempt was so impressive that it couldn’t be contained to just a single world. And sure enough, when Tharizdun’s cultists opened the Vast Gate and created a tiny window into the Voidharrow, the multiverse trembled. And cracked.

When the adventurers featured in The Gates of Madness disrupted the cultists’ ritual, bits of the Voidharrow escaped through the Vast Gate and into other worlds. By the time the heroes arrived, with the Voidharrow already come through the gate and the ritual in chaos, the Vast Gate was flickering from world to world. When the heroes first appeared, they could see through the arch of the gate “an unfamiliar city with a tall black tower rising above it,” but moments later that scene was replaced with another. Soon, a cultist “stumbled through the arch. With a flash of crimson light, the man disappeared into a desert landscape under a dark red sun.” And so the Abyssal Plague spread to the world of Athas, the Dark Sun setting. The story of its infestation there is told in Keith R.A. DeCandido’s novel, Under the Crimson Sun.

Two demons—and one of the heroes—passed through the Vast Gate into the world of Faerûn. A demonic weaver of nightmares and a mass of crystalline spider-like creatures both fell through the portal to the Forgotten Realms, as did Demascus, the hero of Sword of the Gods. All that happened a few hundred years ago, and the seeds of the Abyssal Plague lay dormant in Faerûn for centuries.

In Sword of the Gods, Demascus must reconstruct his shattered memories even as he encounters the resurgent Abyssal Plague. Calling itself Murmur, the nightmare demon can infest the dreams of its host and tear the fears from its victims to clothe in pseudo-living flesh. But Murmur is not without all compassion—it seeks to revitalize a sibling Voidharrow fragment that fell with it, one whose “dispersed” nature has scattered its consciousness. If Murmur can resuscitate its sibling (called Scour), the two Voidharrow demons will move on to their next project: whelming the Forgotten Realms with demonic excess as happened in their own home fossil universe.