Pillars

When darkness had spread across the land...

Work had gotten out an hour before but it wasn't quite dinner time yet. Business at the grocery market was slow for the time of day. The lighting was inadequate and made shoppers uneasy. Not that it mattered much, everything made people uneasy in these times. An unmentionable horror had spread across the land. I was about to find out first hand. The north wall was suddenly ripped from the store, exposing only blackness, instead of the movie theater across the street. A giant malformed hand extended from the gaping maw and wrapped its disfigured digits around me. A similar hand grabbed a young girl, much younger than me. Our eyes met, her resolve told me that we would survive this, my worldliness told her that if there was a way to survive it we could find it.

The hands set us down in a large cave. The wall stretched far above our heads and faded into blackness before the ceiling became discernible. I also saw no light sources but I see could fifty feet in any direction before blackness crept into the hall and then eventually dominated. The stoney walls and earthen floor had a warm and comfortable touch to them. To my left I noticed the girl also exploring her new surroundings. I nodded with approval, and went back to inspecting my portion of the walls. On one side of the cave was rough and looked natural, the other was smooth and as it extended into the blackness slightly curved away from us. I noticed that there were three paths before us. The closest approximation of their orientation would be a "T" intersection one might find driving. The rough wall making the top of the "T", so that the underside of the top and the trunk of the "T" was comprised of smooth walls. She finally broke the silence and asked me how we should get out of here. I didn't trust the smooth walls so she picked a way to follow the top of the "T" in the direction closest to her. I started walking but met an unseen barrier before I caught up to her. She turned around and came back to ask me why I wasn't following her. I told her I couldn't go any further so she tried to grab my hand and drag me along but the unseen barrier prevented her from doing so.

The hands grabbed us again and set us down in a large elliptical room. Maybe three hundred feet long and one hundred feet wide. These are order of magnitude estimates at best since two incredibly large pillars were at the foci of the ellipse. One pillar was fiery red and emitting wave after wave of intense heat. The other was a glacial blue and was blasting waves of icy cold air at the same periodicity. The waves were reflected by the walls of the ellipse, getting amplified and reflected before meeting in the middle and dissipating each other. We were placed in the intersection of the major and minor axis of the ellipse and were surround by a vortex of elemental fury every ten minutes or so when the waves met. Either end of the major axis was unaffected by the opposite pillar so one end was molten and the other frozen. The girl and I marveled at this enormous heat engine, which I assumed powered the Earth in some manner. The perfect timing of the pillars energy release was astounding even the tiniest difference would cause one pillar to eventually overpower the other. Fire and Ice surrounded us in a violent futile battle for supremacy.