Book One – Chapter 1

Still, Yves could not stop staring. The stray bolts that had chased him and Midnight during the ascent were nothing but splinters cast from a far greater violence. The lightning did not descend from the sky. It converged everywhere within the white flood of fire. Vast silver beams tore across the basin. They scoured the air and broke against one other and hammered into the burning core. They burst from cracks in the crater wall, flared from seams in the glass-fused stone, and leapt from ruin to ruin wherever the drawn-in Adhar accumulated, merged, and found no path except inward. Every path bent eventually towards the centre. The air thrummed with forced convergence. Shockwaves emerged everywhere the lightning clashed. The bolts crossed and overtook one another so rapidly that Yves could not distinguish one impact from the next. Their force reached him through the arch, through the ground beneath his knees, and through the locked tension of his jaw. He felt it in his teeth and in his bones, and through how much it unsettled Midnight.

And still, he tried to see. Each flash of silver breached the white masses for an instant. In those instants, the fire opened. Yves caught suggestions of depth: dark disturbances inside the brightness, and descending ruptures where the impossible manifestation of molten Adhar folded around something it could not penetrate. Then another beam struck and the opening vanished.
             A fraction later, the fire divided elsewhere. There —