The Chaos Balance

CXLIII

…And chaos burst into the air, with dark dust, and the odor of brimstone, and the heat of furnaces stoked by the hearts of stars.

Nylan and Ayrlyn stood. Legs unsteady against the ground that surged beneath them, they stood.

The earth heaved like a chaos-fevered giant, and dust surged from every crevice. Gouts of fire flared irregularly from the hills and plains. Behind them, in Rohrn, even the lowest and rudest buildings swayed, and roofs sank and crumpled between splayed walls.

Farther north and east as well, as far east as Henspa, as far north as Carpa, houses, buildings, shuddered, and some fell. Others were etched with cracks across white plaster and stucco.

Soil flowed like water, in places swallowing grass, in places bursting forth like a muddy tide, slow-splashing across once-cultivated fields and once-grazed meadows.

The link with Cyador, prompted Ayrlyn. Now! Do it deep.

Deep? Of course. Nylan almost laughed as he reached deep, then sent his probes deep and south, as he could feel that intertwining of the forest reaching for what he fed, for what he channeled. And the forest swelled, and order-chaos tendrils swept and strengthened themselves beneath all Cyador, beneath the new rivers and the old, beneath the old hills and the new, beneath the towns of order built on chaos. And Cyador trembled…yet held against the forces Nylan and Ayrlyn raised.

Whhsttt! Whhstt! Whhstt!

Three fireballs slammed against the order barrier beyond the Lornian forces, rebounding into the charging white lancers. The tall force leader on the white stallion somehow dodged the firespray, still leading his force toward the outnumbered Lornians.

To the right of the struggling angels, a black-garbed figure raised a blade, and tenscore armsmen galloped toward the other company of oncoming Mirror Lancers. Lances of reflected light played across the Lornians, and some raised hands to be able to see against the glare.

“Frig…” muttered the engineer, trying to twist the rising gouts of order to separate the two forces, realizing he could not stop the fires that would strike Fornal and his men, not with the forces already unleashed and rising. “Frig…”

Chaos fire burst from the ground, not in a line, but like a forest of fire trees. Like a forest, like a forest. The fire trees lifted the charging Lornians and the lancers on both sides of the black angels, strewing them like harvested grain, like stalks scythed, black-crisped instantly, and cast aside as fast-dispersing dust.

The tall Mirror Lancer officer raised his blade, even as he was no more, as man and horse crumbled into scattered and powdered charcoal.

Nylan sensed the death all around, closer, more immediate. Absently, the engineer winced, even as he knew the first two companies of white lancers had been turned into charcoal, and that Fornal was no more. The Lornian regent might have survived, had he waited.

The tripled notes of the Cyadoran battle orders echoed forth once more, and yet another line of Mirror Lancers heeded the horn calls. The ground vibrated again, as their mounts threw them toward the Lornian lines and the angels who struggled there. The horses charged toward the fire trees of order-bounded chaos. For a moment, but a moment, the white livery and shimmering shields threw back chaos, before the horses and Mirror Lancers flared into blackened figures that rose, and fell, crumbling like towers of finely powdered charcoal.

Another set of chaos fireballs splatted against the unseen order barrier.

The engineer’s legs wobbled, and he sat down, still struggling to hold order and focus the deep chaos on the remainder of the Cyadoran forces, forces so numerous, numerous like the grasses of the plains.

But wildfire takes grasses.

With a groan, he/she visualized/coaxed/shaped the raging deep chaos into a wildfire, chevied by order winds, sweeping south and west from Lornth, incinerating all in its path, turning all above the ground into cinders and fine ash.

His/Ayrlyn’s guts turned, and white agony stabbed through them both, and Ayrlyn staggered and dropped onto the dusty grass beside Nylan. He reached for her hand, unseeing, panting, still trying to hold open order channels, as hot chaos bubbled upward all through what had been ancient Cyador, all through what had been the domain of Naclos.

They could sense, could feel, the hills to the south shudder as they shed their unnatural cover of soil. Could feel as the marshes along the ancient riverbeds all the way south to the Great Canal of Cyador, all the way west to mighty Cyad itself, called themselves back into being, twisting neatly tilled fields into sinkholes and pulling cultivated crops under oozing dark waters. As the great river that had been…twisted and churned out of recent banks and into older ones. As lesser rivers reappeared, and finely mortared canal walls dropped beneath earth and mud and water. As the buried shoreline boulders sprang forth again, shattering building foundations and bringing down walls in cities as far distant as Syadtar and Fyrad. As the Great Forest of Naclos rose from the ashes of chaos to balance the steaming mass that had been Cyador.

Had that small cottage where they had learned so much…had it survived? Nylan’s single thought was twisted from its question with an even more violent series of earth tremors.

With all the changes, the shudders deep within the earth, the grinding of magma and congealed stone, the explosions of superheated steam-with all the changes came the darkness that bound order and chaos, chaos and order, the darkness that held balance.

That darkness rose on the plains south of Rohrn, rose and crashed over Nylan, over Ayrlyn, and night surged like a tide across the grasslands, across western Candar, and even up the jagged spires of the Westhorns.

The once blue skies darkened, and the storms rose, spreading southward and westward to touch the shores of the Great Western Ocean with heavy drops of water darkened with soot and dust, and northward to the Northern Ocean.

And Naclos…and all of Candar shuddered with the rebirth…and the relighting of the chaos balance….