Chaos Balance
CXLIV
A DULL RUMBLING echoed from beneath the ground, and the man in silver-trimmed white robes stood and studied the receiving room. The floor quivered, and dust puffed from between the minuscule cracks in the stone tiles.
Lephi shifted his weight and glanced at the dust, a deep frown forming on his face. “Dust?”
He turned and walked from the smaller malachite and silver throne toward the window. He staggered as the floor stones moved again ever so slightly beneath his feet. When he reached the window, he grasped the white stone sill to steady himself as he surveyed the area to the south of Syadtar.
A hazelike darkness dimmed the sky, and the sun's light was cold on his face and hands.
As the floors of his command center trembled again, the white walls of Syadtar wavered as well, moving as ships upon a troubled sea. Beyond the white walls, the earth churned, as if by a muddy sea whipped by a massive storm out of the south. Slowly, as slowly as Lephi's mouth opened in protest, the brown waves rose and then crashed ponderously over those white walls, submerging first the walls, and then the houses that were already little more than heaps of shattered white stucco and stone and crushed roof tiles.
“Triendar . . . you did not say it would be like this.” His eyes were fixed upon the relentless approach of the ever-rising wave of earth and rock. “You did not say . . .”
Crackkk. . .
Lephi glanced from the advancing tsunami of earth back over his shoulder and up at the lacquer-screened balcony. The massive stone blocks of the building's walls teetered and began to bulge inward.
With a bitter smile upon his face stood His Mightiness Lephi the White, Lord of Cyador, ruler of all lands from the mountains of the skies to the oceans of the west, Protector of the Steps to Paradise, Son and Seer of the Rational Stars. Lephi waited in that moment of time suspended. Waited and watched as the very earth rose around him, as the long-delayed balance was righted, as the white stones of Syadtar fell around him, enfolded him, and then buried him beneath the churning earth.