others were drifting westward toward the Khalkists, some
fleeing, some in pursuit. . . and they all were sport for Krog.
Below him on the slope, the humans’ campfire blazed
brightly, and the humans gathered around it. He watched,
and repressed the urge to rush down at them, to hear their
first screams of terror. Let them have a minute or two to
stare into their precious fire. Let them night-blind
themselves so they would not see him until he was among
them. It would make his attack easier, with less likelihood
of any of them fleeing into the darkness.
Stare into the light, he thought, licking wide, scarred
lips with keen anticipation of the pleasures to come. Stare
into the fire, and . . .
He raised his head; his grin faded. He stared into
another fire, a fire that sprang from a glowing coal in the
overhead sky and grew until it seemed to fill half the sky.
Searing light far brighter than firelight, brighter than the
light of day, billowed out and out until the entire eastern sky
was ablaze with it. Sudden winds howled high above,
shrieks and bellows of anguish as though the very world
were screaming. The radiance aloft grew and intensified,
instant by instant, a blinding blaze of sky in which
something huge, something enormous and hideous,
coalesced, spinning and shrieking, and plunged downward
to meet the eastern horizon in a blinding blast of fury.
Stunned and half blinded, he stood on the slope, barely
aware of the sounds all around him – birds taking terrified
flight, small creatures scurrying past, the screams and
shouts of the terrified humans just down the slope. Panic
and fear, everywhere… then silence. A silence as complete
as the recesses of a cavern seemed to grow from the world
itself as the brilliant, distant light dimmed beyond the
horizon. A slow, agonizing dimming, like the reluctant
ebbing of a hundred sunsets, all at once descended.
Out of the silence came a sound that was not a sound
as much as a tingling in the air, a mounting of invisible
tensions. Past the eastern horizon, where the immense flare
still lingered, lightning danced and black clouds like
mountain ranges marched up the sky, one after another.
The inaudible sounds grew and grew, becoming a torrent of
vibration that strummed the winds and made rocks dance
on the slope. In the distance, gouts of brilliance spewed
upward, rising above the clouds to shower the eastern
world with marching storms of fire.
Shouting and screaming, terrified creatures rushed past
him, the largest among them less than half his size and
wide-eyed with fear. The humans from the slope below,
slavers and enslaved, fled together in panic. They ran within
arm’s reach of him, and he barely noticed them as they
passed. Dazed and dazzled, he stared out across a landscape
gone insane, a landscape where distant mountains writhed
and shattered and sank from view, where serpentine
brilliance danced in a fire-lit sky gone black with climbing
smoke, where the horizon heaved upward like a tidal wave,
rushing toward him.
Winds like hammers swooped down from aloft and
struck him with a force that sent him tumbling backward,
arms and legs flailing helplessly as oven-hot gusts rolled
him uphill a dozen yards and dropped him into a heaving
pit. His club was wrenched from his fingers and flew
skyward, carried by raging winds. Struggling, fighting for
balance, he got his feet under him and climbed, drawing
himself over the edge of the chasm just as it closed with
stone jaws behind him.
In a bedlam of howling, furnace winds, shattering
stone, and deep, bone-jarring rumbles from beneath the
ground, he lay gasping for breath, then raised stricken eyes
as the nearer mountains to the west began to explode.
Huge boulders rose into the sky like grains of flung
sand, then showered back down onto the slopes, bounding
and rolling downward, bringing other debris with them as
they came.
He struggled upward, dodging and dancing, flinging
himself this way and that as monstrous rock fragments shot
past, shaking the ground with their force. A tumbling
boulder the size of an elven mansion bore down on him, and