Suddenly Josh was back in darkness again, but this time the darkness was not complete. On all sides he could see the finest traces of light, wriggling hair-thin cracks of red fire. It was like looking at an eggshell, he realized. The cracks widened and broke apart, and then the fire cascaded downward. He realized then that he was in a cave, standing on the edge of a lava pool, while molten rock flowed past him.

“And at the center of every world is its fiery heart.”

Josh was unsure whether he was moving past the images or standing still while the images raced past him. He felt as if he was rising up through bubbling rock and blazing stones, glutinous boulders and dripping globules of fire. He rose faster, faster, faster, the burning walls streaking by him… and abruptly there was sky above, shockingly, spectacularly blue, though smudged with filthy smoke and boiling clouds.

“Fire created this world… shaped it…”

Josh soared high into the air, shot up in a plume of lava and smoke from the maw of an enormous volcano, one of a line that erupted in sequence, tearing away huge chunks of landscape, forming and re-forming the barren world, giving it shape before ripping it apart again.

“It was fire which ignited the spark of life on this primitive planet…”

Thick gritty clouds swirled around Josh, then suddenly cleared, and he discovered he was walking along the edge of a lake, though it was not a lake of water. The thick souplike substance steamed and boiled with enormous noxious popping bubbles. And floating on the surface of the boiling mud was a sludge of gray algae.

“Heat brings life…”

Even as Prometheus was speaking, the landscape before Josh’s eyes was changing impossibly quickly: vast swaths of grasslands appeared, and died away, replaced by trees that rose spectacularly high only to crumble and be replaced by smaller trees, ferns and bushes.

“… in all its myriad forms.”

And now the animals appeared. Small at first, then morphing into huge hideous beasts, pelycosaurs and archosaurs. Josh knew these were the creatures that had predated the dinosaurs. Fascinated, he tried to look around this primeval world, but the images flickered past, leaving little more than an impression of scales and fur, claws and teeth.

“And fire destroys…”

The sky darkened; lightning flashed, and then fire ravaged the forest, and in a single instant the world was blackened, the trees scarred with the evidence of a terrible conflagration.

“Fire destroys, but it also creates. A forest needs fire to thrive; certain seeds depend on it to germinate.”

And at the base of the trees, brilliant green shoots poked through the cinders, twisting and writhing up to the light…

“And it was fire which warmed the first of my people, the humani, allowing them to thrive in harsh climates.”