At first, nothing happened. Whiteness and the blinking eyes of the archon and the jagged crack. But after a few seconds the gaze of the archon reoriented, its head tilted backward, the eyes peered skyward, and the light that had enveloped her dissipated, leaving her vision numb and glazed with odd colors but functional enough that she could loll her head and see what the archon saw.

The spiral of clouds parted at its center. The immediate effect was that a ray of sunshine—true sunshine—shot through and struck the light of the archon. But further still, bathed in this cascading ray, hung the tiny figure of Sloan Redfearn, her coat spread behind her and her arms clenching not a gun but a colossal bazooka, twice the length of Sloan herself. Her already small arms appeared comical in comparison to the immensity of the weapon she held above her head.

In the immense rotundity of the cannon's barrel, a light coagulated. Molecular, atomized particles built within it, stolen from the rays of sun (her pale fire she something something something), coalescing into an orb, a sphere, a star of its own. More energy fed into it, it built until Sloan's small body disappeared beneath it, until it seemed like the sun itself, their sun, had fallen from its Ptolemaic position at heaven's zenith and now surged toward the planet as an ultimate doomsday. Delaney's mind went numb, her mouth fell open and her eyes screeched in agony at the constant buffet of brightness. But she could not look away or even close her eyes.

From the orb burst a godlike ray. It descended, combusting all the atmospheric elements in its path. Nitrogen, oxygen, argon, neon, helium assimilated into the resplendent ray, filled it with a rainbow sheen that flickered across its long shaft like an electric pulse. Down the holy bolt sailed, down and down and into the upturned face of the archon, crashing into its cracked visage, swallowing its light, creating a mixture of lights so fierce that everything became a nebulous emptiness, a lack of existence, a vacuum of sense and feeling.

The archon loosed a pixelated wail, digital and synthetic in its timbre, infused with compressed petabytes that spanned the whole of known and unknown music. Out of the senseless whiteness the black outline of its true face, beneath its shroud of light, reared back, an immense human skull with a hundred eye sockets embedded across its cranial plate, each socket with a wide round eye rendered schematically. The crack in the center of the skull spread, widened. Flecks of bone blasted outward to absorb into the nothingness. Its pointed fangs snapped, broke, tumbled down its throat. Its eyes rolled up, melting, resolving into white dew that ran down the skeletal cheeks like milky tears.

Out of the crack emerged a four-fingered claw, its talons hooked forward as it reached into the stream of light, a many-jointed arm rising from where the archon's brain should be, stretching skyward for the source of the light. But as it forced its way deeper into the fire, its fingers bent back, the nails snapped and the skin peeled, stripping away to reveal only brittle arthritic bones along which spread fractures and lines, until the fingers burst into dust and the palm dissolved as a stigmatic mark devoured it whole. The many-jointed arm twisted, writhed in agony, its flesh and musculature exposed, then swallowed too, and even the thick bones dwindled to long black streaks in the whiteness, until nothing of the hand remained.

The skull exploded. Like ceramic shards the forehead plate dispersed into the light until only the lower jaw remained, and then this too shattered. The light coursed further, into neck, into the endless spine, into the arms and the many scuttling legs, into the claws, into the tail, into the envenomed barb.

Then the light stopped. It simply cut off entirely, no tapering, no dwindling, no gradual fade. It ended. The whiteness vanished and the city of Minneapolis returned, its many towers and wide flatlands, its circles of homesteads and culdesac neighborhoods and snow-sunk roads. The withered, blackened, charred frame of the archon, stripped of all flesh and blood and body, clung to the edge of the Pillar for a moment, and then burst into a tremendous cascade of pixels—grief cubes—that rained down the side of the tower and into the streets below.

Nothing remained. Delaney slumped to the ground and watched Sloan Redfearn plummet from the sky.

(Chapter 27)