It began as famines have begun since the beginning of the world, with the failure of rice crops due to a typhoon. There were no reserves of food to avoid the crisis. The wind hurtled and cavorted, whirled and roared, and the rain hissed and smashed and pattered and turned even the dry uplands to mud. The floods submerged the young rice and tore it from the soil and carried it into the new- made rivers of rain into the swollen rivers from the mountains of the Himalayas. And as the waters ran into the sea, the horror was born. The local stores of rice and wheat were also destroyed. With the floods, came the creatures from the secret subterranean cities, whom the world now called the Lozi. The stores they had stolen from the paddy fields were gone, and the water was flooding their cities, so they were driven out of the earth by the fear of the floods and the fear of starvation, and they emerged to a land already ravaged by nature at her most violent, to a people stunned and shocked and hungry and helpless.
