Brightly Burning

Too late.

She flung her head around to stare at him as he scrambled to reach her.

Her eyes clouded with agony as she collapsed; but her gaze caught and held his. He reached frantically for her, but he couldn't hold her. A greater power than his wrenched her away from him.

He only heard her, fainter with each word, as her eyes closed for the last time.

:—I—love—you—:

Then she was gone.

*

UP on the mountainside, the tiny figure of the Companion crumpled, and fell with a single, heart-rending cry that Pol heard only in his mind, a cry cut off with the finality of death.

Up on the mountainside, Lan crumpled beside his lifeless Companion.

It was not Mindspeech as such, that cut across the brains of every living creature in and around the battlefield. It was a mental howl of anguish, of grief, of terror—it drove tears into unwilling eyes and sent some to their knees in the snow. It triggered the worst memories of every person on the field—Valdemaran and Karsite alike.

Pol clasped both hands to his head as the cry cut into his very soul. It went on, and on, a grief like a sword cutting him in a million pieces.

—and it was not sane.

Then—Fire, elemental, unstoppable, came to earth.

It exploded down out of the sky and drove down on the Karsites like the very hammer of the gods. It spewed up out of the snow to meet the down-rushing flames of the sky-fires. In a single moment, it transformed the entire side of the mountain to a furnace, an inferno, and it spread from there faster than a man could run.

—gods—

Now Pol knew why Heralds had seized trumpets to sound retreat, and mind-voices had sent the Valdemaran forces scattering for their lives. Foresight had given them the warning that something apocalyptic was about to happen, but not what, nor in time to prevent it.

*

FIRE exploded down the mountain, an avalanche of flames.

Lan lay over Kalira's body, the dragon unleashed, unfettered, and free to ravage as it willed. All of his grief, rage, and hatred filled it and gave it a power beyond anyone's direst nightmare.

So long as it consumed him, he was beyond caring.

:Wait for me, beloved. I'm coming. But first, I will avenge you....:

He closed his eyes, gave himself over to the dragon, and set the world, and himself with it, aflame.

*

:KALIRA!: Satiran, lost in his own grief, shuddered once, then lifted his head to the sky and keened out his loss to the heavens.

Pol wanted to howl with him. Kalira was dead, struck down by a Karsite assassin's arrow. Lavan Firestorm had nothing to help him control his powers—and with the death of his lifebonded Companion, no reason to want to—no reason to live.

He needed no fuel for his fires now; he could burn the rock of the mountains if he chose, burn the very air itself.

The fire had a voice—it howled like millions of damned souls. It had a mind, and the mind was mad. Karsite and Valdemaran alike scrambled to escape the battlefield before the fires caught them. From the ground to the mountaintop, there was nothing but flame. Fire churned and roiled, fire roared and shrieked, fire filled the sky. Vortices of flame twisted, hellish dancers with the grace of a streamer in the wind and the appetite of a demon—

Even as Pol watched through his Companion's eyes, Satiran's voice keening on and on in his mind and ears, those nearest the flames were suddenly sucked up by a wind or the firestorm itself inhaling, pulled off their feet, into the air, and then, screaming, into the maelstrom.

—gods—

The maelstrom pulsed once, like a spasming heart, and enlarged again. Bits of burning debris rained down around him, kicked out of the top of the vortex. Fiery twigs. Ashes. Coals and cinders. The bright, glowing skeletons of pinecones. Once, horribly, a burning, human arm that landed with a dreadful sizzle in the melted snow beside him.

Pol could only sit, and stare, numb with horror, paralyzed with grief. Satiran keened on, trembling, oblivious to anything else.

Something tugged at his arm, nearly pulling him from the saddle. 'Come on, man!' the Lord Marshal's squire shouted in his ear when he didn't respond. 'Come on! If you stay here, you'll cook!'

The heat from the inferno was incredible; the snow turned to steam before Satiran's eyes, the ends of the pine needles around him curled up. The firestorm pulsed again, spasming, and expanded once more.

'Come on!' the squire shouted again to Pol. Then, heroically, he seized Satiran's bridle and forced the Companion's head around. 'Come on, you stupid git!' he screamed, kicking Satiran in the side. 'Move! Move!'

Neither of them could move on their own, but the squire was not to be denied. He tied Satiran's reins to his