Roger Zelazny
The dawn of Amber
Part 1

PROLOG

ONE YEAR AGO

I felt the world around me bend and sway like the branches of a willow in a storm.
Strange colors turned, misshapen geometries that couldn't possibly exist but somehow did,
drifting like snowflakes, patterns within patterns within patterns. My vision brightened then
dimmed, repeatedly, and in no perceptible rhythm.

Come ...

A voice... where? I turned, the world kaleidoscoping.

Come to me ...

The voice pulled me on.

Come to me, sons of Chaos ...

I followed the sound across a land of ever-changing design and color to a tower made of
skulls, some human and some clearly not. I stretched out my hand to touch its walls, but my
fingers passed through the bones as though through fog.

Not real

A vision? A dream?

A nightmare, more like it. The thought came from deep inside.

Come ... the voice called to me.

I gave in to the sound and drifted forward, through the wall of skulls and into the heart of
the tower.

Shadows flickered within. As my eyes began to adjust to the gloom, I could make out a
stairway of arm and leg bones that circled the inside wall, climbing into a deeper darkness,
descending into murky, pulsating redness.

I drifted down, and the redness resolved into a circle of torches and five men. Four of
them wore finely wrought silvered chain mail of a design I had never seen before. They held
down the limbs of the fifth man, who lay spread-eagled on a huge sacrificial altar, a single
immense slab of gray marble threaded with intricate patterns of gold. His chest and stomach had
been opened and his entrails spread across the altar as though some augur had been reading the
future from them. When the victim shuddered suddenly, I realized the men were holding him
down because he was still alive.

I reached instinctively for my sword. In any other time or place I would have rushed
them, decency and honor commanding me to try to rescue this poor victim. Only he isn't real, I
told myself. This was some sort of vision, some kind of fever dream or premonition.

I forced myself closer, staring at the dying man, trying to see his face. Was it mine? Did
this vision predicting fate?

No, I saw with some relief, it wasn't me on the altar. His eyes were a muddy brown; mine
are blue as the sea. His hair was lighter than mine, his skin smoother. He was little more than a
boy, I thought, maybe fourteen or fifteen years old.



"Who are you?" I whispered, half to myself.

The suffering victim turned his head in my direction.

"Help me," he mouthed. He seemed to be staring straight at me, as though he could see
me.

I reached out for him, but my hand passed through his body and into the stone of the altar.
Had I become some sort of ghost? A powerless creature forced to watch atrocities unfold around
me, with no power to act?

I pulled my hand free. A mild tingling, like th...

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