The spark in Zeus's palm didn't flare. It swallowed.
It was a tiny point of absolute black, but not a cold, empty black like Lucifer's. This was a hungry, living dark. The air around it warped, sucking in the hellfire from Lucifer's raised claw, pulling at the very light.
Lucifer hesitated, the hellfire in his hand guttering. "What is this? A final trick?"
Zeus didn't answer. He let the spark fall from his hand onto the ground.
It didn't hit the ground. It sank into it. And then, the ground remembered.
It remembered being molten, before continents, before life. It remembered the chaos of creation, the raw, untamed fury of a universe being born. The fused glass of the crater didn't melt; it un-formed, boiling backward into a seething, elemental soup. Jagged spires of rock and fountains of raw lightning erupted around Zeus, not from the sky, but from the earth itself.
