Titans of Chaos

We saw the tops of pillars the size of skyscrapers holding up a sky of stone. Light from beneath,bright as the sun, but colored like moonlight seen through rippling water, played back and forthacross the underside of this pillar-upheld firmament.

Like jagged teeth in the wide gap between the lower brink and the upper hill-covered roof nowheld aloft, we saw the many fortresses and walls, overlooking wide passes between them. Thesepasses were the heads of roads and highways leading down into that underground universe. Onlythe tops of the roads were visible to us, but the shape of the mighty slope down which they rolledcould be detected from the contour of the pillars, minarets, and hanging gardens that overtoppedthem. The upper battlements of the chain of fortress walls fell lower the farther they were fromthe lip of the pit-or should I call it the boundary of the landscape- and the roadways were nodoubt parallel to them.

There were pennants and battle flags hanging from every window and archer slit. Siege gunspeered from over the fortress walls, and sixteen-inch guns, something that would grace theheaviest dreadnought afloat, looked down from pillboxes and fortified positions beyond.

And from this chasm, roaring and murmuring, came a noise of many voices calling out.

My ear heard only a roar of ocean noise. A higher sense detected an inner meaning: "Death! Tothe Orphans of Chaos! Death!"

It was the battle cry of Lamia.

Like a river breaking from a dam, endless lines of cavalry poured forth from the passes betweenthe forts. Amazons on their swift steeds streamed with quiet haste down the slope.

All the central, metal eyes of all the steeds were lit, a thousand little winks and flashes of azurelight, a constellation of blue stars approaching through the green trees and brown stumps, thecolumns of ash.

With them, less orderly, were maenads. What I had seen before had not been an army, or even ahorde. Compared to this, the hundreds from which I had been running had been merely a flyingsquad, a detachment.

Song rose up from the battlements. Thousand-voices strong, the choir of music and magic roselike a rising sun from out of that inner, underground universe. Siren song.