Swords of Kos - Hekaton

"'Hekaton! Hekaton! Hekaton!'

From his quarters at the top level of the City Guard commandery that controlled the main entrance to the Hippodrome of Kos, Commander Ivan Pieger could hear the crowds chanting in the grand plaza some five stories below. Hekaton, of course, simply meant “one hundred,” and was shorthand for hekatontaetirída, or 'one-hundred-year anniversary,' but the full expression of the term did not roll off the tongue very nicely and could not easily be chanted in unison by hundreds of frenzied souls.

Pieger got up from his paper-strewn desk and strode — as much as he was able to stride on his short, somewhat bowed legs — over to the narrow casement window that looked straight out onto the plaza before the great oval-shaped Hippodrome. It was still more than a full day before the start of the Titanomalia, the annual commemoration of the great volcanic disaster that had rocked the very pillars of the world and which many people believed had been caused by a great war between the Gods and the Titans. It had, in any event, awakened the forgotten races, monsters, and magicks of a primordial age that had preceded the relatively placid era of human-dominated peace and commerce that was ongoing at the time of the cataclysm.

The Titanomalia was always a chaotic spectacle but this one promised to be unprecedented, corresponding as it did with the hundred-year anniversary of the cataclysm ..."