"Take them all, including Katha, to the Square of Dying. We will witness their hanging together."
Tyr laughed aloud and stretched, feeling a mad inferno of fire bathing him. His pores were opening, one by one, accepting that insane incandescence with a strange and alien hunger. A man would have died in madness long ago, but Tyr did not die.
He watched the metal of the car weep itself into globous molten droplets of metal that bulged and oozed and bubbled. A cable parted, and the car plunged free.
There was brightness here, all around him as he watched the car flare in riotous colors. The irridescent hues of red and blue and white flashed for a quivering instant, then puffed into mist that was like a bath of minute motes of color.
Tyr reached for an outcropping of volcanic rock, and clung to it. He lifted himself, and stood on a stone ledge.
Beneath him, suspended in a mighty chasm, was the Glow.
The Glow was a tiny sun!
It hung in an endless abyss. It pulsed and throbbed and quivered, and shot streamers of fire upwards and around it. From its moving core, the leaping tongues shot out, expending its energy and, by its own inconceivable heat, restoring the elements to begin the process all over again.
Many ages ago, the Earthmen discovered solar energy. When deVries invented the multilinear umbra-cell, he discovered that it would hold hordes of hydrogen atoms that could be heated to a point that made them an atomic sun. From these bits of power scientists built small suns of their own, and hung them in deep abysses. From their everlasting power they sapped the energy needed to drive their machines and light their homes. They fed the solar power through tentacles of spun carborungsten into generators and dynamos.