Scientific Sorcery

Part 19

"There!" Sponyani smiled.

The hiss ahead of him had changed to the rushing of wind, and now Sponyani could see something else ahead of him. Where all around was the glowing red sky of his world, ahead of him he could see a small dark line in the air. It had started small, looking like a speck of dust. It had grown fast, stretching to the vertical first, and then fattening wide. Where first it looked like an object, as it grew it revealed itself to be a hole—a hole in the universe.

It was now the size of hand, but it was a hole. Sponyani could see dark, cloudy sky through that hole. Wind blew in through that hole. Water was collecting around the edges, sliding down and dripping off the bottom tip. It was like his sky was a window with a hole in it, and a storm outside was letting itself in.

How long would he have to wait before it was big enough for him to enter? What if it didn't get any larger than it already was? Sponyani didn't want to wait, and he didn't want to risk that it wouldn't grow any larger.

Sponyani growled and began to summon fire. He could feel it lapping at the dams that held it back, like a river inside of him. With no effort at all, he felt the dams drop. Sponyani let his inner fire engulf him. He opened his mouth as flames licked outward. Fire also shot from his eyes and ears and began to ooze from his pores. In an instant, he exploded into flames. At that moment he ceased to be. An entity of living flames took his place. The fire still held the shape of the demon. Blazing wings still beat the air behind it, leaving sparks and waves of heat, but the mind of the flames was no longer the demon. The mind wanted to burn and consume.

The fire demon knew that there was a world to burn through the crack in the air before him. With a hunger biting at it, the entity flew closer to the aperture. It lifted a hand toward the void, and its fire began to drift away, coiling off its arm like unraveling string. The strings surrounded the crack in the air cautious at first. A flame ducked through the fissure, recoiling for a moment when it felt the sizzle of rain. The flame demon moved even closer. There was something through the opening. A new world?

With one flap of its wings, the demon threw itself at the opening. Flames surrounded it, flowing over, around, and through. The flames that passed through the hole giggled in the painful rain, but the demon fire was too strong to be extinguished. Now it could see both sides at once. The other side was a new place. There was a sky of clouds and an earth covered with sparse grasses. The demon fire chuckled. That would be a tasty snack.

The fire began to pull in on itself. The fire outside the opening contracted, while the fire already inside began to stretch out in the rain. It narrowed into a column—squeezed together at top and bottom and wide in the middle—shaped by the hole. The fire thrashed and snapped at the air, jerking itself through. More and more fire birthed itself until at long last it was free.

# # #

Lilith screamed and fell back to the ground. The sky above her lit up with an explosion of fire. Though far above her, she could feel the heat of the flames on her skin.

"YES!" She was overcome with joy, "Come Seteh!"

The fire was huge—magnificent. It stretched out like a snake. Then it pulled together as a burning sun in the sky. Two points of fire emerged on both sides, forming themselves into wings of fire. The wings pulsed up and down, the ball of flame rising with them. The ball began to stretch, beginning to take the shape of a man. Lilith could see a head. Two arms. Two legs. He had come to her.

Heart pounding wild, Lilith scrambled to turn to a bowing position, ignoring the cut of rocks on her bare knees. Arching her back as she bent forward, she brought her legs to her chest, and placed her forehead to the ground. She put both hands before her, palms down. She was supplicant before her Lord. She squeezed her eyes shut, tears dripping.