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Far off, as it were happening in another world, the battle between Sselli and Isier still raged, a suicidal struggle of a single race pitted against itself by that strange, uncontrollable hatred of like for like. Locked in the relentless embrace of mutual destruction, they still pitched screaming over the rim of the symbolic world toward nothingness, screaming as angels might have screamed who fell over heaven’s walls in the War of the Seraphs.

Then, far down in the Well as Sawyer stared after the vanished Goddesses, wings began to flicker, lights began to rise.

Sawyer flung himself flat upon the glass floor, hugged it, strove to be unreal, not there, dead and vanished. For he knew that flicker. He had seen it before, in the Fortuna mine out of which in some incredible way it was now rising, and there was no power in creation that could control it now, with Nethe gone and the summoning symbol with her.

Now the Well was open and uncontrolled, drawing upon the full destruction latent in Earth’s poles, and through it, upon other dimensions and other spaces no human mind could grasp.

Up out of the Well a geyser of fountaining violence came pouring. And the geyser was full of the flicker of V-shaped wings and the high, ringing song of the Firebirds, as the whole exploding force of the magnetic fields beyond the Well burst upward into Khom’ad.

In midair the fountain flattened and came showering and soaring down. The living Firebirds swooped in a terrible, scattering swarm over the battle, darting with wings nearly furled, like javelins of fire. Compulsion drove them as strong as the terrible revulsion which locked Isier and Sselli, two by two, in murderous battle whenever they came within arms’ reach of one another.

The divided race was recombining, but in a new and violently destructive form. For the Isier isotope had gone through not two, but three alterations before it closed its circle. The Firebirds were the third.

They swooped above the battle, and soared and struck. Wherever they touched the struggling figures below, a fusion took place which the mind could not conceive. Sawyer, hugging the glassy floor, knew he was going mad. No one could watch this happen and not go mad to think of it.

For when the three separate stages of this single basic race fused, there the exploding violence that was geysering up the Well burst out in irresistible fury. Until now, the Isier had been following a circle of change. When energy failed them and they dispersed upon the air in a cloud of molecular mist, they had reassembled through some other-dimensional door upon the world of the Under-shell, where the Sselli form took shape out of that mist.

But that was not the end. Energy had been lost, and it must somehow be regained. So the Sselli, in their turn, changed too. Again the other-dimensional door opened—but not in this world. It opened upon Earth. It opened at the Pole to which Khom’ad had been indissolubly fixed through the axis of the Well. And avidly into Fortuna poured the glittering Firebirds, which were the third and last unstable isotope of the Isier race. The richly complex uranium with all its potent energy locked inside those heavy structures of electrons had fed the Firebirds until they absorbed enough to whirl them helpless and unremembering back around the cycle into the ice-hall and Khom’ad again. Only Nethe had known what was happening, and all she could do was desperately try to keep the cycle turning without interruption until she could become Goddess and restore the Firebird.

There had always been a safety fuse for the Isier. Originally it had been the Firebird itself, which became non-conductive whenever the other end of the Well touched too powerful an energy-source in the universes beyond Khom’ad. But after the Firebird’s theft, the Well no longer poured out the energy the Isier needed, and as they changed into the new and dangerously unstable isotopic form, another, stranger safety-factor came into play, dependent on the low binding forces that hold the heavier elements together. As the atoms of unstable elements may go through a cyclic change—so the matter, the wave-lengths, the form that made up the Isier had been able to pass through a cycle of transmutation.

And it was a safe enough cycle, so long as the three forms did not meet. All the legends that deal with fission between life-forms have the same infallible end. When the divided selves meet, they destroy themselves.

For now the Firebird, the perfect energy-conductor, had charged the inert channel of the Well. It sucked up the energy-forms of the Firebirds from the uranium mine on Earth and drew them inexorably back to Khom’ad to complete the fatal isotopic interlocking.

This time it was not a circle but a spiral they followed, the same suicidal spiral that begins with uranium 238 and whirls so swiftly through the instability of neptunium to plutonium and back to uranium again, but 235 this time, and—fissionable. In critical mass—it explodes.

Within the Well there sprang into visibility the whirling glimpse of a planet, falling, spinning, diminishing as the bond between Earth and Khom’ad snapped and the two worlds swept apart in space, and then irrevocably were parted by the wall between two kinds of space, two dimensions that could never touch except through the adaptive link of the Well itself.

The Well opened into a blackness beyond space and time.

But up from it still poured the fountain of the Firebirds, bringing the last necessary factor into the equation. The cyclotron of the planet shuddered under the impact of this titanic energy, and—

The new isotope formed. The utterly new element that was Isier, Sselli, and Firebird combined into critical mass.

One instant Sawyer saw them stand fused and locked into three inter-dissolving figures wherever the merging struck them, three and yet impossibly one. Serpentine savage and shining demigod a monad together, with winged fire lifting from the shoulders of each unbelievable golden figure, they stood frozen.

This was Satan before the Fall, Sawyer thought insanely, his face pressed to the transparent floor that did not stop his seeing. Tremendous shining figures, part serpent, part angel, winged with fire that made the very mind go blind with its brilliance.

One instant they stood godlike in space, locked in a frozen moment of conflict. Then the geyser of exploding violence burst outward, like the cloud that stood first over Almagordo. Terribly it hung above the hollow world of Khom’ad—hung and spread.

It spread through directions the mind could not follow, nor the eye. The Firebird that could irresistibly conduct all energies drank now the energies of the Isiers’ death. The demigods who, in making themselves immortal, had extended into—into elsewhere, now saw the cloud of their destruction burst elsewhere and roll in great, blinding billows of violence elsewhere, while the flesh of the gods went up together in the fires of heaven.

Only the echoes of gigantic thunder rolled through the vast and empty sanctum as rifted space healed itself after the passing of the gods. And the axis upon which all their power had turned was the Well of the Worlds no longer.

Dead, empty, burned-out blankness, the Well lay charred upon the glassy floor. Sawyer’s dazzled eyes still held the after-image of its final blaze as it died, and that glitter upon his eyelids was the last thing he saw as all memory failed him.

Thunder in his head shocked him to life. He stood on glass, above golden emptiness. He had been standing here a long time, facing a Mask.

He could not remember clearly.

But a masked figure was coming toward him slowly through the breach in the glass wall where a thousand years ago, it seemed to him, he had watched the Sselli pouring. He knew now why he stood motionless, and what he awaited.

From beyond the broken wall a murmur and a rising chorus of men’s voices was beginning to echo higher and higher in a crescendo of triumph. He heard bells far off begin to swing, not in alarm now but in paeans of thanksgiving.