She watched the power burgeoning, the bucking frenzied, the tendrils whipping like the limbs of some giant, wave-thrashed anemone.
Darkness had been peeled back by the bristling energy, the shadows dancing wild. A sudden shout.
The heaving chain sprang loose, the roar of its escape thundering in the ground beneath Seren’s feet. Figures staggered as the wave launched skyward, obliterating the night. It crest was blinding green fire, the curving wall in its wake a luminescent ochre, webbed with foam in a stretching latticework.
The wall swallowed the north sky, and still the crest rose, power streaming upward. The grasses near the mages blackened, then spun into white ash on swirling winds.
Beneath the roar, a shriek, then screams. Seren saw a soldier stumbling forward, against the glowing wall at the base of the wave. It took him, stripped armour, clothes, then hair and skin, then, in a gush of blood, it devoured his flesh. Before the hapless figure could even crumple, the bones were plucked away, leaving naught but a single upright boot on the blistered ground in front of the foaming wall. The crimson blush shot upward, paling as it went. Until it was gone. Air hissed past her, buffeting and bitter cold.
She sank down, the only response possible to fight that savage tugging, and dug her fingers into the stony ground. Others did the same around her, clawing in panic. Another soldier was dragged away, pulled shrieking into the wave.
The roaring snapped suddenly, like a breath caught in a throat, and Seren saw the base lift away, roll upward like a vast curtain, rising to reveal, once again, the battered slopes leading to the pass, then the pallid mountains and their blunt, ancient summits.
The wave swiftly dwindled as it soared northward, its wild light reflected momentarily in a patchwork cascade across reflective surfaces far below, sweeps of snow near the peaks and ice-polished stone blossoming sickly green and gold, as if awakened to an unexpected sunset.
Then the mountains were black silhouettes once more.
Beyond them, the wave, from horizon to horizon, was descending. Vanishing behind the range.
In the corner of her vision, Seren saw Nekal Bara slump to her knees.
Sudden light, across the rim of the world to the north, billowing like storm seas exploding against rock. The glow shot back into the night sky, this time in fiery arms and enormous, whipping tentacles.
She saw a strange ripple of grey against black on the facing mountainside, swiftly plunging.