Titans of Chaos

In silence, the beam reached across the intervening space and touched Lamia and burned herinstantly to ash. The ground behind her sagged, for it was now molten rock. The mountaintopexploded in each direction, sending out tons of ash and smoke. In silence, we saw a shock waverush out from the point of impact, a wall of dust and rubble flickering outward at the speed ofsound, concentric rings of shattered destruction.

Then the sound hit us. It was as if a brick wall fell on us.

Back on the island, he had not found the materials he needed to construct all parts of his bodyunder the sea. That had been a prototype, a toy. This was the real thing. A battlewagon. The realVictor: an adult Telchine, fully grown and fully armed.

A moment before the sound struck, I said nervously, "Leader, what do we do?" And Quentinanswered softly, "Destroy them." But he was not talking to me. Quentin was in the path of agolden ray of light one of the lesser weapon-ports along the spine of the dragon-thing wasshedding. Something large and dark and catlike flickered out from behind Quentin and slitheredinto, of all places, Colin's guitar. At the same moment, Phobetor (or, I should say, a grinningColin inside Phobetor's body) was scuttling half-bent across the deck to snatch up the guitar.

His hoof touched a spot where the Chaos muck was still bubbling. Now he straightened up again,standing at an odd angle to the deck, as if it were a flat surface to him.

When the shock wave passed over him, it did not knock him flat. Instead, he grew larger, and thewind swirled around his mane and shaggy hair, and he spread his wings to catch it. And helaughed.

At the same moment when the dragon sheered off the top of the mountain, the siren choir, to savethemselves, rotated into hyperspace and unleashed a dire barrage of death music. Anall-destroying energy filled the area.

I could see them. This little pocket of dream-space in which we were stranded, this landscape ofcherry blossom trees, was surrounded in all directions by a hollow four-dimensional bubble ofchaos stuff. Imagine a firm island surrounded by a marshy lake, a solid planet surrounded byvacuum. The sirens jumped off the shore when their part of the island erupted, stepped into spacewhen the planet was under attack.

It was a mistake. The guitar, with no amplifiers and no speakers, woke at the laughter of thedemon prince, and jarring electric noise, as loud as the shock wave that heralded its birth,thundered out in all directions.