“Ah, Troubadour, it is time for war. At last my ancient lust for blood shall have the banquet it desires.”

He drew his cape in a great wide arc and was gone.

The Singer gazed once more upon the globe. Then looking starward, he strummed his lyre and sang a requiem:

“Oh, Terra, Terra! I have loved you so,

And sown your golden fields with songs of peace.

I died to hear the music you should know

By now … The Song to bid your surging cease.

“Why, Terra, did you turn to hate? Infect

Your blue and earthen hope of joy with

Sin and greed? Earthmaker’s love was wrecked

On your restless need for death and war.

“I’m coming once again through battlefields,

To let you know how much I care. I’ll bear

A gentle sword whose wounds will heal—

Embrace you in the flaming carnage—share your final hour.

“As I once died, you too must pass away.

But trust my singing promise as your own.

My melody shall sound above the fray

Of battlefields: you shall not die alone.”

He finished the requiem and turned away, stepped off the silent asteroid and disappeared in lingering chords that haunted cosmic emptiness.

A passing comet swept the skyway and hurried off in dread.

II

When the heavens finally dissolve and the sound of splintering suns grows deafening around colliding worlds, some prophet will be found extolling hope while fissures crack the ground beneath his feet.

Beware, O earth, the prophet who claims to know the time but never wears a watch.

The cities stood erect. Their windowed obelisks once were pyramids of light. But light had dimmed.

After ancient Urbis fell, Singerians multiplied till every portion of their world held shrines dedicated to the Troubadour of Life.

Now they knew that Terra’s life imprisonment was nearly done. They had studied THE FINALE—that book which once had passed through the labyrinths of lower Urbis. They knew their empty rides around the Center Star would soon be through. They saw at hand the tragic, comic ending of their world.

The War of Fire had come.

Yet war was old. It had wounded history for centuries. Armies trained for letting blood, and blood had flowed from battleground to battleground across the grieving years. The War of Fire would be the end of war, for when it came, the storms of flame would reach around the planet and set the very seas ablaze.

Men had come to know the doctrines Everyman debated. Terra knew at last that she was round—that all her oceans froze in pillared ice, where arctic seas rose up in frigid death. Her mines contained a cold and evil ore hidden a thousand feet beneath the ice fields of the Crystal Range. Brought to light the metal burst into caustic flames that fed upon the flesh of men. Men feared that the ore of death would write the universal end upon the days.

Elan, Emperor of Ellanor, owned the mines and stored the ore in mountain arsenals.