I said finally, as staring failed to make sense of what I saw, “it’s . . . definitely not what I expected.”Achernar’s expression probably matched mine—the dumbfounded expression of a man who’d opened the hood of his car to find that the engine consisted of three hamsters running a giant wheel at three thousand RPM.Syl didn’t look quite as surprised, but she was obviously overwhelmed by the sheer scale of destruction . . . and, I guessed, the lingering traces of the power that had echoed to her halfway around the world.A crater over a mile across was impressive enough from the air, but on the ground the sheer scale was terrifying, especially as we’d had to pick our way through flattened forest giants that had been smashed like dry grass in a tornado.But what held my attention was the answer to our mystery—an answer, however, that gave us more mysteries. In the precise center of the crater was a small patch of untouched greenery, no more than three feet across, on a pillar of earth and stone that rose from the bottom of the mile-wide bowl.
