They punched through the barriers between the universe and the world, the shock of their passage creating a rent between the universe and the land that never healed.

Star Gate.

The five craft screamed as they exploded into flame, breaking apart and scattering fiery debris over the darkened landscape beneath them.

Yet even though antennae, wings, empty escape pods, fuel tanks and navigation equipment were torn off, the core pods of each craft remained intact, although fatally crippled.

Nothing could control their descent, save the hearts of those contained within.

The creatures struggling with the controls inside the craft knew they would die within minutes, but they were content in their dying, knowing the secrets they carried would remain safe on this world.

This was a world far, far from their origins. Too far for the Questors to find them easily.

It was tens of thousands of years before the ancient Enchantress would be born and would take into her bed those varied creatures she chose to father her three sons. The land was peopled with humanoid races, hunters and gatherers ... among them the race that would give rise to the forest Avar. They lived in tents across the plains of this land which no one yet had the skill to name.

These died in their tens of thousands as the molten debris stormed down through the night sky.

Some lived in the marshes bordering the great central river.

They died also as the debris and sparking fuel rained down among them and set the marshes ablaze.

Only those who had camped in the warm caves of the mountain ranges and spreading hills survived in any great numbers. What debris struck the mountains bounced, then rolled down the rocky cliffs. Some few did die as the heated material, in its rush past the cavern mouths, drew out all the air within, but most survived ... if their hearts did not seize up in fear at the terror without.

Among the raining debris came the cores of the five craft. They struck the land with frightful force, their impact radiating blasts of sound across the continent that killed yet tens of thousands more creatures and peoples.

The creatures within the craft died instantly ... but they had done their best, and they died thinking their best was going to be enough.

Yet if the alien creatures were dead, the core of their craft still lived. Four of them lay dreaming in the foot of the great craters they had created ... but the fifth ... the central one, the command craft, struck the land with such force it burrowed deep into the earth ... and continued to burrow and seek and search until it found the place it needed.

There ... following the instructions buried within its memory banks ... it mutated, expanded, twisted ... creating the goal of its instructions. The City.

At its heart, the imprisoned soul seethed ... wanting the feel of the midday sun across its back once more. Needing.

Across the land, debris continued to rain down, and it set fire to the land, and it burned for five night and five days without ceasing.

Bravest of those left, the woman emerged on the sixth day and stood aghast at the desolation before her.

She stood at the lip where cave mouth met cliff, and stared. Stretching south before her lay a wasteland of charcoal and ash. The great river had evaporated - all that was left to mark its course down to the great southern sea was a twisting canyon half filled with embers and drifting ash.

Above the sky was streaked with red and black, hung about with great clouds of fine ash that were even now still lined with smoldering fires.

She dropped her eyes as tears streaked her face. Where the forests? The grasslands? The snake- and frog-filled marshlands?

Where her brothers and sisters who had wandered the game trails below?

Her husband stepped up behind her and put a hand on her shoulder.

"It is all gone," she whispered. "Where? For what?"

His hand tightened, but in his grief at the destruction before him he could say nothing.

They stood, weeping, watching, until he started in surprise and pointed. "Look! There ... and there!"

She followed the course of his hand. Four great depressions had been punched into the plains, and her keen eyes could just pick out the glint of water within them. Multifaceted jewels and sheets of silver and gold appeared to glisten beneath the shallow waters ... or was that just a trickery of the newly risen sun glinting across the water?

"Lakes," her husband whispered, "given us as gifts by the gods."

"Sacred Lakes," she murmured, shivering. "This land has been seeded with magic."

Her husband sighed, and slid his arms about his wife. "Perhaps ... but it is going to be a bad winter" .