Black Eclipse (The Lord of the Tide)

...And behind them, taller by two full measures of a man, walked He.
The Monster. The Tribute. The Lord of the Tide.

His skin was the colour of scorched obsidian, scored with golden cicatrices, as if someone had carved constellations upon him—not the ones that hang over Olshaug, but others, alien, shifted a hand's breadth to the left, as happens when you gaze at the sky from the bottom of a deep well. The scars did not glow. They were simply golden, and that was enough to make the eye waver: were they wounds, or ornament, or a language in which something was written that no man should read while standing.

His horns were not bestial. Not antelope bone, not jaguar fang. Broken pharaoh's crowns: hoops, prongs, shards of diadems, so long embedded in the skull that they had grown from it rather than resting upon it. One tine was chipped, like a goblet dropped on stone. Itzan thought, for no reason, that someone had tried to smooth that chip and had failed.

His eyes—two discs of eclipse. Black, with a thin ring of fire. To look into them was like looking at the sun through a hole in a lid: first nothing, then pain, then the understanding that pain was still mercy, because sight did not return at once.

In his hand—a spear of bone that no living creature bore. Too long. Too dense. The colour of old ivory, but without the warmth that lingers even in dead elephant tusk. The shaft entered his palm as if it had grown there.

His step cracked the quay stone. Not loudly. With a crunch, dry and short, like the snapping of a sugar-stick. A fissure ran from his foot to the edge of the breakwater and stopped at the first brazier, not daring to go further. The warriors stepped ashore behind him. Their steps did not crack the stone. Only his did.
The priests prostrated themselves. The people closed their eyes....

The story is only beginning.
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The eclipse is coming.
The gods are watching.
And the world will never be the same.