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. A slow, agonizing dimming, like the reluctant
ebbing of a hundred sunsets, all at once descended.
Out of the silence came a sound that was not a sound
as much as a tingling in the air, a mounting of invisible
tensions. Past the eastern horizon, where the immense flare
still lingered, lightning danced and black clouds like
mountain ranges marched up the sky, one after another.
The inaudible sounds grew and grew, becoming a torrent of
vibration that strummed the winds and made rocks dance
on the slope. In the distance, gouts of brilliance spewed
upward, rising above the clouds to shower the eastern
world with marching storms of fire.
Shouting and screaming, terrified creatures rushed past
him, the largest among them less than half his size and
wide-eyed with fear. The humans from the slope below,
slavers and enslaved, fled together in panic. They ran within
arm's reach of him, and he barely noticed them as they
passed. Dazed and dazzled, he stared out across a landscape
gone insane, a landscape where distant mountains writhed
and shattered and sank from view, where serpentine
brilliance danced in a fire-lit sky gone black with climbing
smoke, where the horizon heaved upward like a tidal wave,
rushing toward him.
Winds like hammers swooped down from aloft and
struck him with a force that sent him tumbling backward,
arms and legs flailing helplessly as oven-hot gusts rolled
him uphill a dozen yards and dropped him into a heaving
pit. His club was wrenched from his fingers and flew
skyward, carried by raging winds
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