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.

 

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