The entire basin burned, though not with ordinary fire and smoke. What churned below was some molten, flame-ridden substance, like sand liquefied beyond colour and beaten into a raging whirl of white mass of burning thunderclouds—
No. Never in your life would you call this a cloud, not by any conceivable exaggeration, not even by exponential extreme, no matter how many world-ending storms you had survived. Nor could even the most destructive of forest fire help you to comprehend, in words or memory, the forces that raged here. The white fire swelled through the pit in thick, roiling plumes. It rose in viscous surges of all-swallowing brightness. There was nothing pure in this brightness, nothing weightless, nothing light. It possessed density without solidity, force without any visible substance to contain it. Yves registered the sight as pressure before he could resolve it into shape: the violence of expansion, collision and compression. This was not burning matter. It was pressure made visible, rampant energy forced into such overwhelming concentration that the eye fought to reject what it received.
And yet, Yves could see it through First Sight. That disturbed his entire world view in the most literal sense available. His perception of reality had always depended upon one singular division: ordinary sight perceived matter; Second Sight perceived the ethereal. The distinction was so fundamental and so uncontested, it was a principle of reality itself.
The forces below disregarded that principle entirely. Yves narrowed his eyes until the crater became a white wound bleeding through the slits of his eyelids. Then he let his Second Sight recede fully. The white fire remained. It was there, not as an residual ethereal impression, but as the immediate reality before his ordinary eyes. Yves was looking at world energy through First Sight.
This was Adhar,
world energy compressed
so violently that
it boiled in its own excess.
The entire basin burned, though not with ordinary fire and smoke. What churned below was some molten, flame-ridden substance, like sand liquefied beyond colour and beaten into a raging whirl of white mass of burning thunderclouds—
No. Never in your life would you call this a cloud, not by any conceivable exaggeration, not even by exponential extreme, no matter how many world-ending storms you had survived. Nor could even the most destructive of forest fire help you to comprehend, in words or memory, the forces that raged here. The white fire swelled through the pit in thick, roiling plumes. It rose in viscous surges of all-swallowing brightness. There was nothing pure in this brightness, nothing weightless, nothing light. It possessed density without solidity, force without any visible substance to contain it. Yves registered the sight as pressure before he could resolve it into shape: the violence of expansion, collision and compression. This was not burning matter. It was pressure made visible, rampant energy forced into such overwhelming concentration that the eye fought to reject what it received.
And yet, Yves could see it through First Sight. That disturbed his entire world view in the most literal sense available. His perception of reality had always depended upon one singular division: ordinary sight perceived matter; Second Sight perceived the ethereal. The distinction was so fundamental and so uncontested, it was a principle of reality itself.
The forces below disregarded that principle entirely. Yves narrowed his eyes until the crater became a white wound bleeding through the slits of his eyelids. Then he let his Second Sight recede fully. The white fire remained. It was there, not as an residual ethereal impression, but as the immediate reality before his ordinary eyes. Yves was looking at world energy through First Sight.
This was Adhar,
world energy compressed
so violently that
it boiled in its own excess.
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