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and leaves shot past them, fleeing from the glade.
None of the swirling debris struck the chanting wizard. The winds roared down into the double ellipse,
then outward, but avoided the sun symbol. Above the center of the glade the billowing storm clouds
jigged round and round each other in a majestic whirlpool of energy and moisture.
Lightning leapt earthward to blister the ground. No bolt struck near Clothahump, though two trees were
shattered to splinters not far away.
Somehow, above the scream of wind, of too close thunder and the howling vortex that now dominated
the center of the glade, they could still hear the steady voice of Clothahump. Trying to shield his eyes
from flying dirt and debris, Jon-Tom clung tightly to the tree root and squinted at the turtle.
The wizard was turning easily within his proscribed symbol. He appeared completely unaffected by the
violent storm raging all around him. The sun symbol was beginning to glow a deep orange.
Clothahump halted. His hands slowly lowered until they were pointing toward the small heap of powders
in the center of the inner ellipse. He recited, slowly and with great care, a dozen words known only to a
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very few magicians and perhaps one or two physicists.
The ancient oak shuddered. Two smaller trees nearby were torn free of the earth and hurled into the
sky. There was a mighty, rumbling crescendo of sound that culminated in a volcanic rumble from the
glade, and a brief flash of light that fortunately no one looked at directly.
The shape that appeared out of that flash within the inner ellipse took away what little breath remained to
Jon-Tom and his companions. He could not have moved his knuckles to his mouth to chew on them, nor
could his vocal cords give form to the feelings surging through him.
Soft, eerie moans came from Flor and a slight, labored whistling from Mudge. All were motionless,
paralyzed by the sight of M'nemaxa, whose countenance transfigures continents and whose hoofbeats
can alter the orbits of worlds.
Within the inner ellipse was a ferociously burning shape. The form M'nemaxa had chosen to appear in
was akin to all the horses that had ever been, and yet was not. He showed himself this time as a stallion
with great wings that beat at the air more than sixty feet from tip to body. Even so the spirit shape could
not be more than partially solid. It was formed of small solar prominences bound together in the form of a
horse. Red-orange flames trailed from tail and mane, galloping hooves and majestic wings, to trail behind
the form and flicker out in the night.
Actually the constantly shed shards of sunmeat vanished when they reached the limits imposed by the
double ellipse, disappeared harmlessly into a thermonuclear void only Clothahump could understand.
Though wings tore at the fabric of space and flaming hooves galloped over the plane of existence, the
spirit stallion remained fixed within the boundaries of sorceral art.
There was no hint of fading. For every flaming streamer that fell and curled from the equine inferno, new
fire appeared to keep the shape familiar and intact, as M'nemaxa continuously renewed his substance. A
pair of fiery tusks descended from the upper jaw of the not quite perfect horse shape, and pointed teeth
burned within jaws of flame.
Among all that immense length of horsehell, a living stallion sun whose breath would have incinerated
Apollo, there were only two things not composed of the ever regenerating eternal fire-eyes as chillingly
cold as the rest was unimaginably hot.
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The eyes of the stallion-spirit M'nemaxa were dragonfly eyes, great black curving orbs that almost met
atop the skull. They were far too large for a normal horse shape, but that was only natural. Through the
still angry cyclone, Jon-Tom thought he could see within those all-seeing spheres of black tiny points of
light; purple and red, green, blue, and purest white that stood out even against the perpetual fusion that
constituted the body shape.
Though he could not know it, those eyes were fragments of the Final Universe, the greater one which
holds within it our own universe as well as thousands of others. Galaxies drifted within the eyes of
M'nemaxa.
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