It has been known for some time by a handful of obscure historians and
antiquarians that, in days long past, the bog of Ashtan and its
surrounding area were reportedly terrorised by a creature known as
"Enheduanna". More recently, those legends have been confirmed by the
reappearance of the legendary creature. Haag's terrified cries were the
first herald, and before long a series of dank, fume-filled caverns was
discovered beneath the bog. In response to the return of her former
patron, Babel, Enheduanna had awakened.

The creature wore the form of a beautiful flame-haired woman, with
needle-sharp teeth and black, fire-touched eyes. Rumours circulated
widely. Some claimed that she was a demigoddess in the service of Babel.
Others spoke of her as an ancient and powerful monster, like the beast
that had guarded the old god's seal beneath the Great Rock. Still others
insisted that she was a particularly strong Chaos spirit, perhaps exiled
from Golgotha's court for some grave misdeed. Amid the whirlwind of
speculation, only the three-eyed child priest, Mordanyconus, and the
newly formed Cult of Babel held their peace. They had seen the small
stone shrine hidden deep within the caverns, and they knew the true
import of the small glass heart that rested upon it.

Enheduanna soon acquired a fearsome reputation, and word spread quickly
that those who entered her caverns unbidden did so upon risk of violent
death. The capricious creature seemed to delight in slaughter and
destruction, often making a messy meal of her victims before they were
even fully dead. Her slim figure, clad in violet and jade, soon became a
byword for terror as she moved through the halls of her home, leaving
trails of dismembered corpses in her wake. Only the Babelonians
themselves dared enter that cursed place, and even they occasionally
fell afoul of her fierce temper.

The mad creature's insanity slowly mounted. Her long slumber had exposed
her to certain influences, and those influences only became more
insistent after she awakened. Already prone to violent, destructive
outbursts by her nature, Enheduanna was an easy target. Thus, when the
heavens rumbled and the bone-chilling voice of the God of Oblivion
resounded with a command that she attack the strongholds of Light, she
was more than happy to comply on a grand scale.

Thus it was that Imyrr, a devotee of Babel, found himself drawn to the
deep caverns, to the deceptively simple shrine in the small, rounded
chamber that lies at the end of a winding tunnel far beneath the earth.
Illustrating her comments with elegant movements of her dainty white
hands, Enheduanna instructed Imyrr to take an iron spearhead from its
place before the glass heart on the altar and forge it into a spear
worthy of her task. The spearhead, it transpired, was a talisman that
both focused and contained her power.

Moving swiftly, Imyrr took the spearhead and departed the caverns,
procuring a staff and some rope for the construction of a makeshift
spear. Joined by the Occultist Harmonia, he set out for the Shamtota
Hills with the unimpressive weapon in hand.

The details of the ritual performed by Imyrr and Harmonia in those hills
are shrouded by a veil of secrecy as black as Babel's iron crown, but
the forces it unleashed are known to almost everyone. A loud rumble
shook the area as an earthquake tore through the Shamtota, and the
alarmed Shallamese who arrived at the scene found a landscape of
devastation that took their breaths away. The temple of Lorielan lay in
ruins, her priests and servants slain. The passage to Elysia was sealed
by falling stones, with no way of knowing what state the temple and its
denizens had been reduced to. Fissures gaped open in the ground, patches
of nauseating distortion warped the earth, and piles of stone and soil
moved about of their own accord. In a deep gorge, the assembling group
found a fiery spear plunged deep into the stone. It was the newly forged
weapon of Enheduanna's power, and it was pouring her Chaotic rage into
the helpless landscape of the Shamtota Hills.

The forces of Light reacted immediately, and a large army set off for
the bog caverns where Enheduanna was known to dwell. The child priest
Mordanyconus managed to stall them briefly by pretending to be an
innocent, but Enheduanna's playful voice soon called out from the deeper
caverns to mock the Shallamese for believing the priest's act.
Mordanyconus was slain, his small body carted back to the basilica on
the vague suspicion that he might hold the glass heart mentioned in the
legends. Then Enheduanna showed herself, striding up and down the
tunnels of her home in a pillar of writhing flame. Countless adventurers
fell before her relentless advance. Blood tainted the black waters of
the bog, corpses littered the caverns, and the Shallamese army retreated
in defeat, hopelessly routed by the terrible immortal.

Meanwhile, an ancient epic poem began to circulate among wandering bards
such as Lyaeus and Melodramus. It told the story of Han-Silnar's love
for a beautiful Aldar maiden in the service of Khalas, later stripped of
her divinity by the Tribunal. It further spoke of that maiden's exile to
the infernal court of Pazuzu as a condition of alliance between Khalas
and the demon prince, and of the terrible, unspeakable things in that
place which soon broke her mind and rendered her into the creature known
to modern times as Enheduanna.

Guided by the clues laid out in that poem, as well as in certain other
ancient documents unearthed by a diligent archivist, the Shallamese
discovered that the application of certain crystals in certain ways to
the Chaotic power distorting the landscape could carry an individual
across the land in the blink of an eye, following the lines of power
back to the small underground shrine where Enheduanna's heart lay
hidden. It was the fair Prelate Meleah who assembled the priests of the
Church and organised a sacred rite to bless a crystal pentagon with the
Chaos-repelling power of Light, then brought that crystal to the spear
and used its sacred magic to loosen the weapon's previously immovable
position deep within the cleft earth.

It was the atavian mage Foehn who, with fiery determination in his eyes,
laid hold of the terrible spear and pulled it from the ground to the
applause of the assembled group. Brandishing the dread weapon above his
head, he once more turned his crystals against the Chaotic distortion,
and a huge group flew off through the ether and into the black,
smoke-filled caverns of cruel Enheduanna. The mad beast herself appeared
in the Shamtota gorge, slightly west of the spear's former position, and
those who remained in the far end of the gorge found themselves trapped
between a wall of stone and a towering, bloody-handed creature of fire
and nightmares. More than one cry went out from that place, urging the
party in the caverns to make haste before the thing advanced deeper into
the gorge and once more worked slaughter in their ranks.

The small altar within the caverns was guarded by two immortal firelords
and featured only a simple statue of a woman with a glass heart in her
outstretched hands. Blue flames danced within the heart, periodically
pulsing between intense brightness and dim shadows. It was again Foehn,
wielding the earthquake spear, who discerned the pattern and struck the
killing blow. Just as the flames dimmed, he plunged the blazing length
of the spear deep into the glass heart. The heart exploded into a
thousand pieces, destroying the entire shrine and its firelord guardians
as it erupted.

Abruptly, Enheduanna was in their midst. Her shrieks of rage mingled
with shrieks of pain as she struck out desperately, but it was too late.
Even as her power roared in waves of murderous flame through the
caverns, it turned upon her. The flames that had previously been subject
to her will now lashed out to scorch her flesh, and, within moments, her
screaming form was consumed entirely by a blazing inferno that left only
cinders in its wake. Enheduanna was slain, her power broken, and the
Chaotic taint quietly seeped out of the Shamtota Hills. The damage had
been done, however. Two temples lay in ruins, and countless lives had
been lost. As the Shallamese withdrew from the now-silent caverns
beneath the bog, their exultation was mixed with a sense of sorrow and
bitter loss. They had won a great victory, but that victory had come
with great cost.

Penned by My hand on the 10th of Mayan, in the year 479 AF.