The white glare possessed no temperature. It was neither the blistering heat of a smith’s hearth nor the biting frost of a high mountain gale; it was the absolute, hollow absence of heat, light, and mass.
It did not advance like a wall of fire. It unmade reality from the perimeter inward, dissolving the physical boundaries of the River Lantern Inn into luminous gray ash that drifted upward into a sky that had ceased to exist.
Jon Hale stood in the center of what had been the lower cellar vault.
The foundation walls of dressed granite were gone. The heavy cedar joists that had held up the kitchen floorboards had thinned into translucent ribbons of pale fiber, through which he could see the ghost of his kitchen dissolving into white mist. The cast-iron stew kettle, the rough scrubbed trestle table, the drying bundles of summer thyme, and the wicker cradle where Nell had slept as an infant—all of it was being pulled down into the subterranean vortex, dismantled grain by grain to feed the insatiable appetite of the Crown Furnace.
Above the vanishing ceiling, the town of Harth was fading like chalk washed from a schoolroom slate by a wet rag.
