Chapter the Last,
The Last Day,
In which a shadow wanes.
I. Only One
The severed hand of the black skeleton whipped the liquid fire and molten rock into a compressed hurricane around the pillar that stood in the center of the underground lake. The tempest swelled, all its pressure forced inward to the eye of the storm, a vice squeezing a beating heart—the column buckled inward from the stress, about to implode, when a sudden sapphire light shot out from behind the gray stones. The pillar bulged, filled with a surging power driving up from a depth with which the lake of fire could not contend, and never could.