"Michael Moorcock - Corum 3 - The King of the Swords" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moorcock Michael)

The Vadhagh and the Nhadragh were not aware of this.
They had dwelt a million or more years upon the planet,
which now, at last, seemed at rest. They knew of the
Mabden but considered them not greatly different from
other beasts. Though continuing to indulge their traditional
hatreds of one another, the Vadhagh and the Nhadragh

spent their long hours in considering abstractions, in the
creation of works of art and the like. Rational,
sophisticated, at one with themselves, these older races
were unable to believe in the changes that had come. Thus,
as it almost always is, they ignored the signs.




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There was no exchange of knowledge between the two
ancient enemies, even though they had fought their last
battle many centuries before.

The Vadhagh lived in family groups occupying isolated
castles scattered across a continent called by them Bro-an-
Vadhagh. There was scarcely any communication between
these families, for the Vadhagh had long since lost the
impulse to travel. The Nhadragh lived in their cities built
on the islands in the seas to the northwest of Bro-an-
Vadhagh. They, also, had little contact, even with their
closest kin. Both races reckoned themselves invulnerable.
Both were wrong.

Upstart Man was beginning to breed and spread like a
pestilence across the world. This pestilence struck down
the old races wherever it touched them. And it was not only
death that Man brought, but terror, too. Willfully, he made
of the older world nothing but ruins and bones.
Unwittingly, he brought psychic and supernatural
disruption of a magnitude which even the Great Old Gods
failed to comprehend.

And the Great Old Gods began to know Fear.
And Man, slave of fear, arrogant in his ignorance,
continued his stumbling progress. He was blind to the huge
disruptions aroused by his apparently petty ambitions. As
well, Man was deficient in sensitivity, had no awareness of
the multitude of dimensions that filled the universe, each
plane intersecting with several others. Not so the Vadhagh