The sky above Haven-Hold turned the color of blinding magnesium foil.
High Patriarch Ignatius of the Holy Solar Orthodoxy stood atop his golden cathedral chariot, his eight-foot staff pointed toward the heavens.
Around him, two hundred theurgists chanted ancient hymns of solar wrath. Their veins glowed golden beneath their skin as they channeled the power of the midday sun.
Above the valley, the clouds twisted into a roaring cyclonic vortex.
A bolt of pure, packed sky star-fire, six feet thick and crackling with ten million volts of divine static-electric potential, dropped from the stratosphere.
It screamed toward Haven-Hold with the sound of tearing mountains. It carried enough energy to turn to steam an old family granite castle into glowing smoke.
Down in Substation Four, Giles Croft stood on the gravel apron with his pocket watch in his left hand.
He didn’t look at the sky.
