Blade of the Avatar/Blade of Midras/Chapter 9

=Awry=

Excerpt
“Is it night?” Aren asked.

“I’m tired enough for it to be night,” Syenna sighed. “So it might as well be.”

Syenna and Aren stood on an outcropping of rock at the top of the cliff face that overlooked the Hellfire Rift. It was, perhaps, the most inhospitable terrain he had ever viewed. The jagged peaks thrust upward as sharp as finely-honed knives on either side of what passed for a wide valley floor of the Hellfire Rift. The rift itself was a bleeding wound in the world that never healed. Shifting pools of lava sputtered and spit molten rock into slow-moving rivers that glowed with unspeakable heat and shifted down their courses only to cascade back down into crevices once more. In the far distance, through the dreamlike shimmering of the heat waves rising from the molten floor and the haze of ash and smoke, Aren could see a shattered mountain. Great plumes of smoke and ash rose from its maw, feeding the perpetual storm that raged overhead and blotting out the sun and sky as far as he could see. Lancing webs of lightning were being woven among those terrible clouds, constantly fed by the ash and the heat from below. Any forests or vegetation that might once have been here had long since burned away, leaving only the raw stone, sand, and occasional steamy, acidic rain.