Titans of Chaos

Something inside the expanding ball of atomic fire was screaming in fear. It called out in a horridlanguage made all of harshly aspirated consonants and cracking sibilants, and Quentin shoutedback in the same language. Something inside the flame-or maybe it was the flame itself-whimpered. Imagine an elephant whimpering, or a Tyrannosaurus rex. Heck, for that matter, tryto imagine something the size of the Queen Elizabeth II whimpering.

The fireball spread to either side of us and did us no hurt. As for the radiant heat energy...

We did not even feel any heat.

This last was thanks to Vanity, I should mention. The laws of nature of Aristotle obtained insidethe boundary made by Quentin's glowing ring, and Aristotle did not believe in radiant heat energy.

If you dropped a cubic meter of the surface of the sun onto the Earth, instead of exploding, thesupramudane substance, made of quintessence, would merely return by its natural motion to itsdivine place in the crystal spheres that govern heaven in cycles and epicycles. A rather friendlyand human set of laws of nature, if you think about it."

So the blast of intolerable energy released by the collision of two faster-than-light streams ofsuperenergy, when it passed over the circle of Quentin's ward... turned into a soft, silvery light,the light of divine things, shot through with shivering glints of gold. The ancient Greek notion ofthe Sun was that it was a holy thing, the source of life, a great and benevolent daemon, perhapseven a god.

The alchemical, life-creating rays of the sun passed over us and swept smoothly upward andvanished.

We stood in a green circle in the middle of a vast flat plain of smoldering stumps. The maenads, inwhat shape they had been, were dead. My pet Amazon had been instantly incinerated.

The forest for half a mile in each direction was gone. Ash covered the smoking earth. There wasno forest fire raging. Evidently all combustibles had been instantly reduced to their basicelements.

Over a mile in each direction were scattered clouds of black and rolling red, embers and flashes ofdying flame, dying perhaps because they had been blown out by the overpressure of thefaster-than-light explosion.