She remembered then what had been at the back of her mind. Baraccus had told her that the veil to the world of the dead had glowed a strange green when he had passed through it. He had told her that when he had gone though that green wall, that was how he knew that he had crossed over into the underworld. He had called it the green meadow of the spirits.

Magda gasped when she thought she saw a face in the rotating clouds over the structure. In the billowing green light, she saw another, and then another. Each had its mouth wide open, releasing a terrible scream. Each face was distorted in pain and terror. The howls filled the air so that they all joined together into the sound of the roaring wind.

Before long, it seemed as if thousands of vague, filmy corpses were fluttering through the spinning air above the glowing structure.

The sound they made was unbearable. It was terror, misery, and pain all melted together into one long, ripping howl. The green air seemed packed full of writhing, diaphanous figures like so many swimming, squirming, twisting souls all fighting for space. None of them seemed real, none of them seemed alive, and yet they moved with frenzied purpose.

Magda wondered if she had died and was being swallowed up into the spirit world, or if she was suspended, barely alive, beyond the veil in the world of the dead. She wondered if this was what it had been like for Baraccus.

The air above the sword ignited with a massive jet of flame that shot upward. Even at the distance she was, the heat of it felt as if it might burn her flesh from her bones.

The sword heated to white hot. It glowed brighter than anything else, even the bolts of lightning. It was so bright it hurt her eyes. Above it the sky burned with reddish orange flame that turned and churned, blackening as it rolled away, replaced by yet more bright orange fire continually boiling forth.

The ground around the glowing verification web seethed with a carpet of bluish flame that flickered and jumped.

In the center of it, Merritt raced through the walls of flame to pull more lines and draw yet more spell-forms. The world seemed an inferno, while forms in the greenish light howled in fury and agony.

Magda could feel waves of heat off the white-hot, glowing sword rolling over her. The blade glowed incandescent.

Magda thought that surely the heat was burning her lungs. The air above them was a rotating, turning, churning ceiling of flame. The noise of it was deafening.

Black lightning, as dark as death itself, crackled through it all as it arced from the fire above to the hilt of the sword. Every time the black lightning touched it, the blade went momentarily just as black. Magda knew that she was seeing Subtractive Magic called to life before her.