Sublime

“The ash comes again,” the man said through bloody lips, his voice strangely grating. “The world will fall to it. You will get what you deserve, and all will wither beneath a cloud of blackness and a blanket of burned bodies made ash.” Marasi gritted her teeth, working on the rusty-looking spike, slick with blood. “Your end,” the voice whispered. “

Another Vroshir—a longtime partner to the Silverlords—had bound the force of ten billion spirits, an entire doomed world, inside herself. She had been drawing on them for power for centuries, but now she sacrificed her own life to release that power. Billions of ghosts erupted into space, seeking vengeance, seeking an enemy… They were wiped out in

congeries

perforce,

minimum. Four degrees: Europe in permanent drought; vast areas of China, India and Bangladesh claimed by desert; Polynesia swallowed by the sea; the Colorado River

I am, as you know, a bottomless pit of ambition and need. But I also want to make something sweet. Something kids like us would have wanted to play to forget their troubles for a while.” Sadie was moved by Sam’s words—in the years she had known him, he so rarely mentioned his own pain.

But that face, that human, was gone. Mother Nature, as Tennyson said, is “red in tooth and claw,” demolishing every beautiful thing she has ever created.