L. Modesitt - Fall of Angels

Then … ashes fall like snow across the hillside, burning like fire as they touch the dry grass west of the devastation.

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 limbsfrom 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.

Nylan woke, but could not move. His face burned, and his eyes stabbed so much he could neither open them, nor see. He listened, and even the words fell on him like hammers, most rebounding, their meaning lost in the force of their impact.

“ … not a mark on him …”

“ … more than that in him … who else … strong enough to hold a thousand deaths …”

“ … it’s all in his mind … guards died …”

Ryba’s words-“guards died”-stabbed through his ears, and he would have lifted his hands to close them, but could move neither hands nor head, and again he sank, not into darkness, but into a sea of white chaos that burned his body and soul, into a river of fire that flared from the sky he could not see and singed his body like an ox upon a slowly turning spit.

An ox, he thought, a dumb ox … and then, for a time, he thought no more.

Cool cloths bathed his face when he awoke again, if indeed it were the second time, for that was what he remembered.

Blinding light flared through his eyes, tightly squeezed shut as they were.

“Are you awake, Nylan?” asked a husky voice-Ayrlyn’s voice.

He started to nod, but white needles stabbed through his brain, and instead he rasped, “Yes,” afraid to move his head. Even thinking hurt, each thought like a thin knife.

“You need to drink, or you’ll die. I’m going to put a cup to your mouth. Don’t worry if you get wet.”

Nylan eased his mouth open, and swallowed, then opened and swallowed, ignoring the unseen white knives that slashed his face but left no marks, just pain. Some little of the blinding agony eased as he drank, as the water ran across his cheeks and chin, as Ayrlyn softly blotted away the dampness, a dampness welcome for its cooling.

“In a bit, you’ll need more.”

“All … right … now.”

He drank more, and the dryness in his throat subsided, and he slept, still flayed with red-tinged white whips that left no marks, but scarred his sleep and soul.

Over the next uncounted days, he drank and slept and drank and slept, and finally ate, until one morning, he could finally leave the single lander couch with Istril’s and Ayrlyn’s help and sit in the rocking chair that had been moved beside the couch for him.