A Vision of Fire

A towering, sulfurous wave of glaring orange and gold lava spewed from the volcano’s mouth, knocking down the first of a long line of tall, glowing columns that led from the volcano to the sea. Connecting yin and yang, the left hand to the right hand, Caitlin thought with sudden realization. The Technologists had built the array, which gathered energy and passed it from column to column, like tuning forks growing exponentially more powerful. Was this some kind of technological response to the cazh? If so, something had gone wrong with this process as well. One by one, the pillars collapsed beneath the juggernaut of lava rolling toward the city. Clouds of red and black, fire and cinders, fell on the courtyard and buildings. Heaps of hot ash piled onto white and yellow robes that once held souls and were now just incendiary masses of flesh.

The wave of lava would overwhelm the courtyard soon. Caitlin had to find Bayarmii. She followed the sightline of tall columns away from the courtyard to the west, where the columns pierced the sea, shining green from their capstones. A full moon was gasping for breath between breaks in the clouds, strobing its blue-white light across the roiling ocean. The sea was flinging itself at the sky, hunching its back in titanic waves and bucking and kicking at the columns and the shore…

And at ships. Ships with long, graceful dragon’s heads, each carved with a symbol of crescents entwined, the symbol that appeared on the capstones of the columns and in the paving stones of the courtyard — the sole remnant of a time before the rise of conflicting factions, chaos that helped bring a civilization to this precipice.

Focus, Caitlin, remember why you’re here, she told herself. She remembered a young man, a granddaughter, a seal, and felt her mind suddenly fuse with the grandmother’s. She was holding Bayarmii’s hand—

Then the earth shifted as a huge sea wave struck hard, and she fell. When she clambered upright Bayarmii was gone. Caitlin looked back, peering through smoke and mist, ash and flame. She saw that Bayarmii had run back to the white and gray seal, who was mad with fear inside the house. The trees burned outside the front door. It was too late. Too late to join the boy on the boat.

“The cazh!” screamed the grandmother. “It’s our last chance to ascend together!”

The girl obeyed. One of the burning trees fell against the door, trapping the girl and seal inside. A flaming branch cracked on impact, slashed toward her, simultaneously shearing and cauterizing her arm. The words of the prayer became more powerful and immediate and the spirit of the girl rose…

Caitlin could only hope that Maanik was not experiencing this, that Bayarmii was subsumed in the moment. But her hope was overwhelmed by the grandmother’s willpower. She would not abandon her granddaughter. She, too, knew the words. She had been a devotee of the Priests in her youth. She spoke the cazh; she focused on the pulsing energy gathered above the dead and dying in the temple courtyard. Even as waves ran toward her and hot ash sizzled on her bare neck and arms, she spoke…

* * *

Ben saw Caitlin smile. Her expression was almost euphoric. She spoke with gestures: “Hundreds of feet in the air! I want to rise with the sea, with the wind, in a great swell! I want to look down at the white ice cliffs and the black columns…”

The conference room was vibrating as though a subway train were passing underneath, but it wasn’t moving. Ben glanced outside. Through the driving rain and wind he thought he saw the East River rising in fifteen-foot waves. It had to be a trick of the thick glass, the rain, the mist.

He turned back to Caitlin. Her head was upraised, her arms in a pose he had seen when Maanik was at her most distressed, just before they used the blackberries cue. Caitlin’s left fingers were spreading and reaching farther, seeking or pointing, he couldn’t tell. There was a rippling above her, like rising heat.

“It’s everywhere!” Caitlin cried out in English.

Where is the guard? Ben thought. Isn’t he hearing any of this?

He could feel something building in the room, but it was ephemeral, invisible. A hot wind coiled around him. Was he experiencing what Caitlin felt with Maanik, a spillover of some ancient energy, hovering unseen like the air itself?

“What is everywhere?” he called.

“The transpersonal plane!” she cried. “Souls are rising! My god, it is powerful! I am ascendant! But there’s more… I can’t see…”

* * *

Other minds brushed past her, transcending spirits interlacing with each other as they departed one realm and entered another, unified in a churning mass soul. Yet everywhere, too, bodies were perishing before the ritual could be completed, before they could link with the group soul. Those souls were rising alone.