All of a sudden, there was a blinding flash in the black night as a bolt of lightning struck the ground just outside the camp, it's searing brilliance accompanied by an ear-splitting CRRRRAAACK!!! and an echoing thunder that rumbled across the darkened heavens.
Terrified, the entire camp scrambled for cover.
It was the beginning of a terrible lightning storm. Far into the night, coruscating bolts like living javelins of fire struck the ground again and again with their blinding stabs of jagged light. Si'Wren hid also, wondering as she cowered whether the Invisible God was angry with her for giving such clumsy explanations to the Emperor, or so pleased as to reinforce her mere clay words with divine, jaggedly brilliant writing sticks of his own.
One foot soldier could suddenly stand it no longer, and ran off screaming thin shrill cries into the darkness. He had just reached a little hilltop, a mere rise in the land, when -still shouting madly and hysterically- he was hit and blasted. His body lay in a heap, twisted and blackened, the clothes shredded.
Thunder rolled across the darkened land. The camels, horses, and other pack animals were already thoroughly spooked, and Borla gave orders that the precious, irreplaceable animals be given hands-on guarding throughout the night lest they break their tethers and run away.
But some of the watchmen refused to go out into the lightning-filled darkness of this strange and foreign land at first. Then a new form of thunder could be heard throughout the camp, the crack of whips as the Captains of Fifty drove their fearful watchmen out of their tents to go to their duty posts.
Si'Wren sat in her tent and fought hard not to cower or grovel before the storm, and would have passed the entire night in prayer to the Invisible God, had she not finally collapsed into an exhausted slumber filled with tormented dreams and terrible, awful visions.
* * *
With the coming of the dawn, the world seemed a saner place again. The sun rose, and the sky slowly brightened, and soon, except for a certain sullenness in some faces, the soldiers were about their appointed tasks almost as if nothing had happened. Si'Wren arose, and groomed her horse, and saw to his provender. Only after she had taken care of the glossy black stallion, whom she admired more than any horse in existence, did she think of her own needs.
"Am I not," Emperor Euphrates said over a sumptuous breakfast, as he sat gazing speculatively into the freshly fagoted flames of the morning cooking fire, "Emperor Euphrates, ordained of a God who rules even the lightning and sees fit occasionally to pass men through the burning mantle, even as he struck down one of my subjects this past night? And as Emperor, am I not able to do and command as I please, that I might order a child to be passed through the fire, the better to imitate and please this God?"