The city-dwellers scoffed at the crowd on the quay, taunting, laughing outright, enjoying the spectacle. In the harbor, meanwhile, boats came and went as usual and Kellios itself behaved as if what had taken place only hours before were nothing out of the ordinary.

It was not until the shadows stretched long on the pier that Lile came to Charis and said, “The people are tired, Charis. Perhaps we should go back.”

“No,” Charis told her. “I am tired too, but we cannot go back.”

“We could leave the boats, and if”

Charis turned on her. “Go back to the palace, Lile, and you go to your tomb! There is nothing there but death.”

Lile retreated to keep uneasy vigil with the others, and the long afternoon progressed without event. They ate a simple meal and listened to the nervous wash of the sea back and forth among the footings of the pier as the stifling dusk gathered over the bay, deepening rapidly to night.

And there on the quay, the air thick, oppressive, clinging, they were waiting when they saw the sky suddenly torn with streaking fire as burning stars tumbled earthward, piercing the unnatural stillness with the terrible shriek of their passing, smiting restless Oceanus.

The blazing starfall continued, throwing pillars of writhing steam high into the sky. People from the city poured onto the wharf to gape at the sight. No one laughed now.

From out of the mountains far away came the sound of a mighty and ominous rumble, and the crowd turned to stare in horror at burning stars striking through the heat haze, smashing to earth in a dazzling and deadly rain. Curtained by falling fire, the people of Kellios fled to the sea, swarming the quayside in chaos, fighting one another for places in the small fishing boats that now filled the harbor, bobbing in the uncertain swell and streaming blindly out into the night-dark sea.

“The boats are not coming,” cried someone from one of the wagons. “We have to get away.”

“Silence!” Charis snapped. “We wait.”

“We’re going to die!” someone else whined.

“Then we die like human beings, not fear-crazed animals!”

They waited. Dank, steamy vapors wafted in off the sea, which heaved with an oily swell. Kellios shuddered with the horrid rumbling, shaking the buildings on their foundations, toppling columns from their bases. Many, fearing that the quay would give way, ran screaming back into the city, trampling those who could not avoid them.

By sheer force of her will, Charis kept order among her people, moving amongst them, exhorting them to courage as she had so many times with her dancers in the bullring. An-nubi found her pacing the quay, shouting down the fear mounting around her.

“If the ships do not come soon…”He paused.

“Yes?”

“We may have to go out to meet them.”

“No,” said Charis firmly. “We will wait here for them.” She began pacing again.

Annubi fell into step beside her. “We have time yet, Charis. The boats are ready.”

“Belyn will come,” she said stubbornly.

“I do not doubt it. But he may not be able to reach us.” He lifted a hand into the dead air. “There is no wind for the sails. The ships are floundering tonight.”

Charis turned and peered into the darkness of the harbor and the jostling boats amassed there. “Perhaps you are right,” she relented at last. “We have come this far; we can go farther if need be.”

She turned and began shouting orders. The boats, ninety in all, had been lashed together in threes-two bearing cargo on either side of a passenger vessel. Under the direction of Charis’ overseers the people dispersed among them. And one by one, as each passenger boat was loaded, they struggled into the harbor.

From out in the bay, the people looked back. They saw the sickly sky suddenly brighten in the west with a great light that flashed first yellow and then bloodred.

Silence descended over the land. The sea calmed.

Those in the boats held their breath, gripping the gunwales with bloodless hands.

The sound was felt first and heard afterward: the tremendous, shattering, shocking growl from the churning deep. The eastern sky flashed its strange lightning again as the hills began to buckle and quake. Kellios swayed precariously. Charis looked to the palace hill and saw flames flickering among the toppling walls. And over all was the dreadful, hateful sound.

In unthinking desperation, people threw themselves into the harbor to flounder and drown in their panic. Mothers waded into the sea holding their babes aloft. Terrified horses, loosed from their harnesses, careened along the shuddering beach.

The ground lost all solidity. Hills slid down into their valleys, met and melted together. Trees rippled and spun, their roots groaning and popping as the soil beneath them flowed away like water. Houses swayed and crashed into fluid streets, scattering flames and dust. The cries of those trapped on the shifting land assaulted the dusty air like the screams of frightened birds. The sea bubbled and churned as her bed rocked beneath her.

The sky convulsed and spewed fire upon the city. Brimstone, sizzling and stinking, streaked through the tortured air in flaming chunks, plowing furrows in the hills, pelting down into the heaving wreckage, destroying the temple in plumes of gray smoke and white fire. Stone burned; once-bright or-ichalcum rooftops melted and ran. Above the temple, soot-filled smoke rose thick in the air, bearing the stench of burning fat and flesh.

The whole countryside was soon engulfed in flame. Fire raked the hillsides; smoke billowed up and up to flatten and spread like an enormous hand on the upper wind, blotting out the new-risen moon.

The boats lurched in the troubled water as the stone quay collapsed and slid into the water, dragging screaming thousands with it. Charis watched it all with cold and ruthless objectivity, feeling nothing.

The destruction continued through the night as the boats bobbed and drifted in the harbor. The ghostly moon shone darkly over the bay, and vainly the survivors scanned the horizon for any sign of the rescuing ships. Charis watched the faces of those around her and saw grim hope dissolving slowly into despair as time dragged on. “They will come,” she whispered to herself, knowing that as the boats drifted further and further away from land, their chances of survival decreased. “They will find us.”

Near midnight Charis forced herself to swallow a mouthful of food and a little water. She slept and awakened at dawn to see the doomed land thrashing in its death throes… and still Belyn did not appear with die captured ships.

Atlantis writhed and heaved; the mountains sighed and shook themselves out like folds in clothing; the water crashed on the trembling shore; Kellios burned, and south, along the coast, the smoke from other cities ascended on high, darkening the morning sky to an unnatural twilight. All the while the stars struck down through the gloom, bursting on the ruined land and plunging into the water.

Slowly, terribly, remorselessly, on and on it went.

Near midday, though the sky was dark as deepest night, the iron-dark clouds over the land flashed orange and red.

The air shivered and a searing wind flattened the waves as the sound reached them a moment later: an explosion so enormous that the sea stood up in sharp knifeblade waves and the concussion reached them first as a keening howl-which was the pressure wave ripping rocks and trees from the ground- and then as a deafening, sense-numbing roar.

Atlas itself had exploded in a volcanic seizure which split the mighty mountain from its snow-capped crown to its deep granite roots, hurling the pulverized mass into the tortured air. But before the debris could begin its freefall descent, another eruption gouged the middle from the mountain, gutting it in a fiery violet flash, spewing cinder and smoke and fire and molten stone high, high into the atmosphere. In the blink of an eye Atlas became a turbulent column of fire-streaked gas and smoke.