Dee had known fear before and had always welcomed it. Fear had kept him alive, had sent him running when others had stood and fought and died. But this was no ordinary terror: this was a bone-deep, stomach-churning, flesh-crawling repulsion that left him bathed in icy sweat. The cold analytical part of his mind recognized that this was not a rational fear; this was something stronger, something primal and ancient, a terror lodged deep in the limbic system, the oldest part of the human brain. This was a primeval fear.

In his long life Dee had encountered some of the foulest of the Elders, ghastly creatures that were not even vaguely human. His research and travels had led him into some of the darkest Shadowrealms, places where appalling nightmare creatures floated in emerald skies or tentacled horrors writhed in bloodred seas. But he had never been this frightened. Black spots danced at the corners of his vision and he realized he was breathing so hard he was hyperventilating. Desperately attempting to calm his breathing, he concentrated on the source of his fear-the creature striding down the middle of the empty North London street.

Most of the streetlights were dead, and the few that were not shed a ghastly sodium glow over the figure, painting it in shades of yellow and black. It stood close to eight feet tall, with massive arms and legs that ended in goatlike hooves. An enormous rack of six-pointed antlers curled out of each side of its skull, adding at least another five feet to its height. It was wrapped in mismatched hides of animals long extinct, so that Dee found it hard to tell where the skins ended and the creature’s hairy flesh began. Resting on its left shoulder was a six-foot club shaped from the jawbone of a dinosaur, one side ragged with a line of spiky teeth.

This was Cernunnos, the Horned God.

Fifteen thousand years ago, a frightened Paleolithic artist had daubed an image of this creature on a cave wall in southwest France, an image that was neither man nor beast, but something caught in between. Dee realized that he was probably experiencing the same emotions that ancient man had felt. Just looking at it made him feel small, inconsequential, puny.

He had always believed that the Horned God was just another Elder-maybe even one of the Great Elders-but earlier that day Mars Ultor had revealed something shocking, something quite terrifying. The Horned God was no Elder. It was something older, far older, something that existed at the very edges of myth.

Cernunnos was one of the legendary Archons, the race that had ruled the planet in the incredibly distant past. Yggdrasill had been a seed when the Horned God had first walked the world, Nidhogg and its kin only newly hatched, and it would be hundreds of millennia before the first humani appeared.

The Horned God stepped forward and light washed across its face.