CXXVII
CRUUMPPTTT!!!
The building of intertwined chaos and order stretched and stretched through an endless and timeless moment, then ...
A miniature sun-a green and gold fireball-flared in the middle of the hillside below the ridge and east of Tower Black, transforming the soldiers and horses around it into statues of gray ash, then flattening those fragile shapes with its shock wave. The incineration and flattening effect flared through those Lornians farther away as the circle of destruction widened almost instantaneously.
For a fraction of an instant two white-clad figures seemed to stand out against the tide of destruction, as if standing on a crumbling cliff before a tsunami of chaos washed over them, before they too flashed into fire and ashes.
Nylan staggered, but continued to concentrate on focusing the laser even as he felt that wave of whiteness and mass death screaming toward him. With eyes already blind, knives stabbing through his skull, he forced the last ergs of power across the hillside, incinerating all that moved toward the road, raising instant funeral pyres-and the shock waves echoed and reechoed across the Roof of the World.
Perhaps a handful of riders pounded downhill toward the laser, toward the smith who wielded its dying hammer against the remnants of the Lornian forces on the hillside.
As Nylan shuddered under the first of the chaos waves that battered him, clinging to the laser, the five lancers charged the small fort.
For a moment, nothing happened, as the new guards stood stunned, eyes wide at the conflagration and shock waves that had roared across the hillside, at the swirls of ashes and flame, at the charred shapes heaped and tossed like burned limbs from a wildfire, then swirled into less than ashes. At the outskirts of the destruction, charred bodies tumbled into heaps.
"Fight! Frig it!" yelled Huldran, and her throwing blade cleared the wall and slammed into a lancer's shoulder.
Then the others, the white-faced guards, reacted, and three arrows flew, one striking another lancer.
Relyn jumped before Nylan, and the short blade he had once scorned flashed. The lancer fell.
The smith-engineer sagged against the burned-out laser, and his body still shook as the waves of unseen whiteness hammered at him, as he twitched in the grip of chaos and terror unseen to those beside him and around him.
On the western fringe of the hillside perhaps half the Westwind guards stirred, but nothing else moved, except the fine ashes that rained across the Roof of the World, except the last dying flames.
The rapidly mushrooming storm cloud that had begun to cover the entire sky, growing blacker by the moment, swallowed the sun, and the dimness of an early twilight covered the Roof of the World.
Then Nylan's legs collapsed as he slid to the packed clay beside the tripod base of the laser.
The single remaining Lornian lancer spurred his horse northward and up the east side of the ridge. No one pursued, and ashes and rain fell across the Roof of the World.
Soon, so did thunder and rain and hail, the hailstones falling and clumping in piles, white as bleached bones, cold as death.
CXXVIII
"RYBA, THE LEAST of the rulers of angels, thus became the last of the rulers, and the angels, having fallen from the stars after the time of the great burning, came unto the Roof of the World, where they had descended on the winds from Heaven.
"There, in the tower called black, builded by the great smith Nylan at the behest of Ryba, there they took shelter and gathered their strength together, and abided until the winter should lift.
"Yet since then, upon the Roof of the World, as a memory of the fall of the angels, winter yet remains.
"When the first great winter had passed, then Nylan the smith builded yet another forge, a forge of men, not of Heaven, and with hammer and anvil, forged yet more of the black blades of death, the twin swords of Westwind, and after that, forged he the bows of winter, small enough to be carried on horse and powerful enough to split plate armor, and Ryba the angel was pleased.
"Then, as prophesied by the demons, then came those men who were the descendants of the ancient demons, and with their fires of chaos, fell they upon the angels, for the descendants of the demons were fair determined to drive the angels from the world, and to ensure that no woman should prevail, nor rule herself nor others.
"The lightnings were cast against the tower called black, yet that tower held fast against the lightnings of chaos, and against legions of armsmen more vast than the flow of the great rivers, more numerous than the locusts.
"When she determined that the men who assaulted Westwind were of the demons, with a great sigh, Ryba reclaimed the fires of winter and with those fires and with the black blades of Nylan that were sharper than the edge of night, she and her angels smote the demons. They destroyed all but one, and drove him into the east, leaving none upon the Roof of the World.
"So after that time, whenever angels departed the Roof of the World, whether unto the southlands or the western ways, they carried forth the message of Ryba: Remember whence you came, and suffer not any man to lead you, for that is how the angels fell..."
Book of Ryba
Canto 1, Section II
[Original text]