Sentinelspire - Mark Sehestedt [82]
Lewan's eyes went wide with horror, but he could not look away. Instead of blood and his mother's inner organs spilling all over the floor of their croft, a light burned inside-green but warm, like the late afternoon sun shining through a canopy of new spring leaves.
"See," said the voice-
–and Lewan saw, falling into the green light.
The green glow dimmed and he found himself surrounded by blue, broken only by high, thin streaks of white. Clouds. The white was clouds. He turned, and below him stretched hundreds of miles of golden grassland. The Amber Steppes. And directly beneath him was a mountain, which rose into a broken cone. He'd never seen it from this high up, but he recognized it immediately. Sentinelspire.
As he watched, an entire face of the mountain-scores of miles of stone, soil, and greenery-fell, collapsing in upon itself. The landslide had scarcely started sliding down when the entire mountain-and several miles of ground around the mountain-exploded. For a heartbeat, a lightning-flash moment, Lewan thought he saw a white-hot center of fire, but then all of the remains of the mountain and surrounding countryside spread outward in a great cloud of blasted rock and fire, moving faster than the sound of the explosion. The fire-shot darkness swallowed him.
When he could see again, before him was the greatest wonder he'd ever seen. The world stretched out before him. He saw the yellow haze of the Endless Wastes, the darker smudges of mountains and woods, the Great Ice Sea to the north, and hundreds of miles in every direction. So high was he that he could see the curve of the world falling away in every direction. But directly beneath him he saw again Sentinelspire's explosion, as if time had sped up. The great cloud of ash and fire rose farther than the highest clouds, spread out as the wind caught it, and still grew and grew, covering thousands of miles of land in darkness. Beyond the great cloud where the ash thinned, still it spread a murky haze for tens of thousands of miles.
His vision shifted again, back down to woods and forests. He saw rivers choked with ash, dead fish floating downstream to rot in lakes. He saw rain filled with soot and sulfur poisoning streams and fields. He saw fruit wither on the vine and crops rot in the fields from the lack of sun. Summer did not come to many lands, and the following winter was harsh beyond recorded memory. Starvation and disease ran rampant, in man and beast alike. Wars erupted as nations invaded the lands of their enemies-or their allies-in a desperate bid for food. Entire cities burned. Villages were laid waste. Tens of thousands died in the first year. Then even the armies broke apart or turned upon their own ranks as soldiers starved.
But as the seasons passed, the winds and rain cleansed the air, and though Sentinelspire-no more than a gigantic crater-still oozed steam and smoke, the wild recovered. Civilization crumbled as men, elves, and other civilized people tore at one another and became savage in their bid for survival. But forests took root where once men had tilled fields. Trees grew in the midst of ruined castles. Beasts made homes in the broken bones of once-proud cities. Years passed. Where rivers had once run foul with the sludge of sewage from cities, they ran clean again. Sunrises and sunsets were no longer sullied by thousands of fires from cities. Even the great craters hundreds of miles south of the Great Ice Sea cooled and filled with water from clean rain and melting snow. It seemed almost a- Paradise.
The image remained clear, but a new sound broke Lewan's sense of peace. He heard horns, cries of alarm, and people shouting. He looked around, and the image of the new world dissolved and faded, like smoke on the wind.
Lewan opened his eyes and sat up, dislodging