the void's period. Other worlds were born, matured, grew old, died, and passed away in that interlude. Or had the darkness lasted the duration of an eye-blink? Or somewhere in between…
The void's edges wavered, blurred, and then peeled away. Behind was exposed a pale, misted light. The darkness contracted upon itself, becoming a dome, then a sphere, then a blot as it lifted up and away to nothing.
A cloud-shrouded sky of gray, lit with occasional flashes of distant lightning, was revealed.
Eyes slowly integrated elements, as if assembling pieces of a puzzle. Concepts of sky, time, and cloud leisurely assembled within a man's fragmented, subconscious mind.
The man's brow furrowed. A sudden disorientation collapsed his blank observation of the heavens.
Where was he? And…
Why couldn't he remember his own name?
The man turned his head. Or tried to. Some force resisted. His gaze rotated less than an inch. Scanning with only his eyes, he saw he was surrounded in some cold, unyielding substance. He was caught like a bug in some sort of greenish material.
Anger's flame woke. He tried to suck in a deep breath. He failed-he was completely isolated, apparently, even from air. A sliver of his mind wondered why he hadn't already suffocated. The greater portion of his attention focused on the crisis at hand. He must break free, or he would die. Whatever had kept him alive prior to this moment was failing. Already, lack of air made dark spots dance on the periphery of his vision.
A subconscious instruction surfaced: Shout! Scream a single syllable of concentrated desire with the last of your stale breath, and hope it is enough.
The man focused on his diaphragm, then expelled the final vestiges of air from his lungs with an explosive, guttural, 'Kihop!'
The material surrounding his head shattered like dry adobe struck with a maul. Cool air suddenly caressed his face. He was still caught, but at least he could breathe.
He sucked in a long, deep breath, expanding his chest so much that the material surrounding him cracked.
He wrenched his body with a violent strength his limbs remembered, even if he did not. Pain knifed through his left shoulder, and the man loosed a surprised yell.
His left arm throbbed with a twinge so intense that blackness threatened to rob him of consciousness again. Was it broken? No way to tell while he remained trapped.
The man deliberately isolated his left arm while thrusting with his legs and remaining arm. It was difficult to accomplish, and agony spiked through his body once more.
What options did he have? He rested a moment, considering. The problem of his imperfect memory swam once more to front and center. It was maddening. He had to get free!
He wrenched his body again, sucking in his breath against the hurt. And again. Each time he tensed and thrust with his arms and legs, he gained a sliver of additional clearance. Each effort was accompanied with a sound not unlike splintering ice. With unflappable determination, the man struggled in the grip of the strange substance.
When his right arm broke through, extricating himself from the remaining brittle, honeycomb-like stuff suddenly seemed an actual possibility instead of a wild hope.
Finally, the man wrenched completely free. A powder of greenish material still clung to his body.
He examined his erstwhile prison, cradling his left arm in his right. He'd been encrusted in a cocoon-like material thrust from the earth. It wasn't mineral, or at least, if it was, it was particularly brittle. The portion from which he'd freed himself was a hollow space, still partly molded to the shape of his body.
The man looked around and saw he stood on a grassy plain. Here and there, other mineral encrustations broke to the surface, rising only a few feet in most cases. A few spires were larger, and reached dozens of feet into the morning light. Between the strange outcrops, prairie grass waved to the western horizon.
A forest, apparently partly dead of some blight, lay to the south. Skeletons of trees still remained mostly vertical, though newer growth was thick beneath the dead canopy. An ocean of saplings reached up through old, dry underbrush. The man was surprised a wildfire hadn't cleared out the detritus already. Rain and lightning seemed particularly thick in that direction. He wondered if he would witness a lightning strike touch off a blaze even as he watched.
He returned his gaze to the strange outcrops nearer at hand. At first the man thought the extrusions must be quite old. He saw dozens of instances where greenish spires had cracked and collapsed. Other outcrops, like the one he'd just emerged from, had weathered and broken into fragments.
Of course, as brittle as the mass he had emerged from had proved, perhaps the extrusions were not actually that old, in the geological sense.
He stood in place and slowly rotated, looking for something or someone recognizable. His own name seemed just on the tip of his tongue… but he couldn't dredge it up.
He looked east to the line of the horizon. Something in the texture of the landscape, the color of the sky, a scent in the air seemed familiar…
Bumps prickled across his arms and back as if with a chill. Something terrible had happened there. A monstrous calamity-
The man suddenly remembered.
Raidon Kane remembered.
His breath came harsh. His eyes tried to spin in his skull. Nausea threatened to bend him over.
Raidon clapped his hands to his brow, the pain in his left elbow nothing in that moment.
The world had ended. How could he have forgotten?
The fire. The pillar of blue fire had reached up over the horizon.
He saw again the pillar's fat crown of molten sapphire, tumbling and boiling upward. Closing his eyes merely brought the memory into sharper focus.
And the blast! That awful, land-erasing storm front that had swept out from the burning spire.
He remembered horrors: His horse, stumbling and disappearing in the azure turbulence. The woman who'd grown wings of fire, only to be incinerated. The awful, twining hair pulling a goblin's head along the ground- His amulet! It had burned away.
The wind tousled his hair, bringing scents of spring flowers and grass.
'By the Ten Tenants, have I gone insane?' bellowed Raidon, his voice hoarse.
He closed his eyes. He calmed his breathing. A monk of Xiang Temple did not comport himself thusly. Raidon searched for his mental regimen. He was a master of meditation. Images of a pillar of blue fire could not haunt him if he did not wish it.
He visualized his legs, his arms, his head, and that immaterial part of himself that recognized itself as his working mind. He visualized his thoughts as lines of energy. Normally serene arcs, now they were tangled and disordered. His confusion was a vibrating knot, a nest of snakes, preventing him from achieving clarity. He imagined an unseen force smoothing those lines, untying the knot, releasing the hissing snakes. Slowly, his higher will overcame his body's adrenal turmoil.
Tension leaked from his shoulders, and an incipient headache faded.
Such was the training of Xiang Temple. Like all who graduated from that monastery in Telflamm, Raidon was a master of his own body. His techniques for visualization allowed him to control natural processes within himself normally beyond conscious control.
He looked deeper, and saw where other lines, the lines representing his wholeness of body, were strained and even broken in the vicinity of his left elbow. He applied his focused clarity to the severed lines. The snapped cords of visualized energy merged, fused, and relaxed.
The pain in his shoulder faded.
He could see all the lines representing himself, vibrating with vitality, forming a shape in three directions: breadth, width, and height.
Furrowing his brow, the monk began tracing his identity lines in the fourth direction, in time. Perhaps he could discover some clue as to what had happened to him.
An oddity in the wire-frame model of his own body snatched his complete attention. A pulse of a color he couldn't describe slowly glimmered across his upper torso. Something blue, like the ember of some slumbering
