Young Chron ran toward me but I waved him away.
“Get out,” I shouted to him. “Get out to the open country where you’ll be safe.”
“But you—”
“Go! Now! I’ll be all right.”
He hesitated, then reluctantly turned toward the gate and followed the others out toward safety.
Through all this the ground trembled, then stopped, trembled again and stopped again. Finally the courtyard was empty of every living creature except me. The ground stopped shaking. Silence returned. And the stars shone down out of a cloudless sky.
“Anya,” I called aloud. “Are you here?”
“I will be soon, my love. Soon.”
I understood what she had done. While the other Creators had assumed their natural form as spheres of pure energy and scattered out among the stars, Anya had hidden herself deep within the earth, waiting.
I wondered if time passed at the same rate for a goddess as it did for a man. She had projected herself back to this point in spacetime to wait for Set’s command of his core tap to falter enough for her to seize control of it. My makeshift attack up here in the courtyard had given her the chance. While Set was concentrating on dealing with me, Anya took control of the energy bubbling up from the earth’s molten core.
Set himself had shown me how even the Creators could be destroyed once their source of energy was denied them. Anya had taken that lesson and turned it on the devil himself. She had taken over the core tap and was now in the process of dismantling it. His screen that blotted out starlight was already gone.
The ground shook again, harder than before. I could hear the rumbling deep beneath me, like the muttering of some titanic beast. The courtyard was undulating, solid earth surging up and down like the waves of the sea. The circular wall swayed drunkenly. A section of it broke apart and came crashing to the ground.
Still I sat there, trying not to bleed to death, unsure of whether or not I could get to my feet even if I tried. The ground beneath me shuddered even more. The wall at my back quivered and groaned.
And then the middle of the courtyard erupted in a fireball that blinded me, it was so bright. Squinting so hard that tears coursed down my cheeks, I blurrily made out a fountain of red-hot lava erupting from the bowels of the earth, pulsing out waves of heat that seared my face even though I was a good hundred yards away.
“The core tap is destroyed, my love,” said Anya’s voice. “I can join you now.”
“Not before I do,” came Set’s implacably hate-filled voice.
And out of that bubbling fountain of molten hot lava boiling up from the earth’s core stepped the huge red form of Set, looking like evil incarnate, a horned demon whose reptilian eyes glittered with fury and hatred for me.
I grasped the scimitar at my side and tried to push myself up to a standing position. No use. I was too weak to stand, I had lost too much blood.
Set’s taloned feet paced closer to me, closer, until he loomed above me, silhouetted against the darkness by the glowing red-hot lava of the molten fountain in the center of the courtyard.
“You have destroyed my world, Orion,” his words burned through my mind. “But you have not destroyed me. I will destroy you.”
He reached down and clenched his clawed fingers around my throat. Lifting me completely off my feet, he began to choke the life out of me. His claws cut into my flesh, my blood flowed over his hands and arms.
I slashed at him with the scimitar, but I was too weak to harm him. His mighty arms protected his chest against my feeble swipes, and his scaly armor was proof against my blade’s edge.
Turning with me dangling between his crushing hands, Set paced slowly back to the fountain of fire. My vision was blurring, I could not breathe. The world was going dark.
“You will roast in the flames of agony for all eternity, Orion. I still have enough control over the forces of spacetime to give you the most painful death of all. Burn in hell, Orion! Forever!”