For now it was a flood. Down from the immense wheel came pouring cataracts of green fires. They cascaded over the cones; deluged them; engulfed them.
Beneath that radiant inundation the cones grew. Perceptibly their volume increased—as though they gorged themselves upon the light. No—it was as though the corpuscles flew to them, coalesced and built themselves into the structure.
Out and further out upon the base of crystal they crept. And higher and higher soared their tips, thrusting, ever thrusting upward toward the whirling wheel that fed them.
Now from the Keeper's planes writhed the Keeper's tangle of tentacles, uncoiling eagerly, avidly, through the twenty feet of space between their source and the enigmatic mechanism they manipulated. The crater's disks tilted downward. Into the vast hollow shot their jets of green radiance, drenching the Metal Hordes, splashing from the polished walls wherever the Metal Hordes had left those living walls exposed.
All about us was a trembling, an accelerating pulse of life. Colossal, rhythmic, ever quicker, ever more powerfully that pulse throbbed—a prodigious vibration monstrously alive.
“Feeding!” whispered Drake. “Feeding! Feeding on the sun!”
Faster danced the radiant beams. The crater was a cauldron of green fires through which the conical rays angled and interwove, crossed and mingled. And where they mingled, where they crossed, flamed out suddenly immense rayless orbs; palpitant for an instant, then dissolving in spiralling, feathery spray of pallid emerald incandescences.
Stronger and stronger beat the pulse of returning life.
A jetting stream struck squarely upon the Metal Emperor. Out blazed his splendors—jubilant. His golden zodiac, no longer tarnished and dull, ran with sun flames; the wondrous rose was a racing, lambent miracle.
Up snapped the Keeper; towered behind him, all flickering scarlets and leaping yellows—no longer wrathful or sullen.