[insert fleeing from collapsing Court, trek across fair folk lands, at least a whole chapter]

Calixte froze, poised on the edge of an overhang on the tallest island mountain in the Circling Sea. One minute she was peering into a deep forest pool under the guidance of [name2], the next she was apparently about to fall off the tallest cliff known to her people. She tried to breathe very shallowly, lest she topple.

Faintly and far away, she heard [name2] and Vidatha, calling her name. “You can’t fall!”

Easy for them to say. They weren’t the ones standing on the edge of the cliff! She glanced up, out to where she thought Atlantis was, and sucked in breath so hard she choked. Coughing so hard her eyes teared, she wrapped her arms around her middle and tried to remember how to breathe. When her vision cleared, she was back in the forest, surrounded by [stuff here].

“Are you okay?” [name2] asked.

“Atlantis,” she gasped. “The whole island … it’s on fire! Send me back! Send me there, I have to do something!”

Vidatha knelt behind her, peering into the pool. “We can’t send /you/ there, only your spirit. The best it can be is you as a helpless observer, riding in someone else’s body. Someone who is sure to die, with you still riding along. It could be,” he hesitated, then finished with masterful understatement, “bad. Are you sure that’s what you want?”

Calixte looked at him, eyes full of anguish. “I caused this. I have to be there. Somehow. Anyhow. It doesn’t matter. Send me back.”

“Calixte, the shock of being in someone else’s dying body could kill you.”

“Do it, Vidatha!”

With what felt like an audible snap, she was back on the height of the cliff, and this time her gaze tracked unerringly to the far island. Just in time, as a dizzying spiral of inertialess motion seemed to pull her down and toward the climbing column of smoke. Her insubstantial spirit shot through the city streets, filled with hurrying, busy folk, and she was shocked to notice that no one seemed panicked at all.

Then she was slammed into one of the moving bodies, and everything went away for a moment.

When her awareness returned, she was apparently moving at an easy pace along the main avenue. She tried to glance around, forgetting for a moment that she wasn’t in her own body, and mentally stumbled at the lack of response. Reorienting herself, she directed her awareness around her, trying to learn how to obtain information in a body she didn’t control.

Abruptly, the earth underneath ‘her’ feet trembled. A few shrieks rang out around her, and she noticed the [haste] of the people around her redoubled. Earthquakes were common enough; everyone typically knew what to do in a quake.

So what had caused the smoke?

Another tremor rolled the earth beneath ‘her’ feet, and this time it was strong enough to cause her host body to stumble. A third rumble drew a zigzag crack along the width of the street, and the movements of folk around her took on a frenzied pace. Calixte understood why.

No earthquake in Atlantis’ five hundred year written history had been strong enough to damage the city. The city was designed to withstand everything the Great Mother Goddess could throw at it, from flood to fire to quake. An earthquake strong enough to damage the main avenue was of unfathomable strength.

And no earthquake caused the land to smoke.

As her host body wended its way through the city, she realised they were heading for the outskirts, and inland. She turned her attention upward, and soon spotted the column of smoke, now visibly thicker and darker. Inland was safer, if the ocean became enraged by the shaking of the land. But that smoke frightened her more than anything in her life ever had.

Masses of people, many of them weighted with heavy packs or precious treasures, now streamed toward the fertile hills surrounding the city’s harbour. Her host body was carried along with them. Calixte could almost taste the fear in the air. There were no plans to cope with the city falling apart under their feet.

As they neared the higher points of the hills, the tremors increased in strength and frequency, until they were as much being flung forward by the ripples as they were actually walking, and many were running. Most of the houses along the street and for several past were seamed with cracks, and so were the streets. Screaming broke out ahead, and she turned her thoughts that way in time to see two or three people … vanish.

The screaming intensified, and people were stumbling backward, and now she could see, by virtue of the height of her host body, that an enormous gaping crack had opened across the roadway, apparently right under the feet of the folk who had vanished. The earth had swallowed them whole. Around her she could hear the prayers, always sent up in times of catastrophe, change in tone and form, as people stopped asking the gods for help and began to beg to be saved from certain death.

They detoured down smaller and smaller streets, reaching the familiar bare alleyways. Calixte saw several of her murals, religious and secular. Most of them were cracked, faded, derelict. She spotted one, a wing-spread depiction of mythical dragons, which was now missing a large chunk near its top. Another step along the street, and she spotted the missing piece – and a small hand flung out from underneath the huge block of stone.

Anguished, she pulled her attention away. But more and more along the streets the ranks of fleeing folk were being thinned by falling stonework and dangerous cracks in the earth. Crushed up against several buildings near those cracks, she saw ominously still bodies, bodies with no mark on them. What could have caused that, she wondered.

At last, the crowd began to pour our of the narrow alleyways and into the climbing valleys wending their way through the hills. Overhead, the sky was beginning to be noticeably darkened by the thickening smoke, and she fretted at the mystery of it. People began to disperse among the valleys, seeking safety away from the stone buildings in the heights.

The tremors seemed to be weakening, and Calixte wondered if perhaps the event was over.

Then an enormous BOOM rolled across the land, and she realised with despair that the catastrophe was just beginning. Fire seemed to shoot into the sky, and the smoke increased in density again, obscuring the sky and clouding vision in the valleys. The whole world seemed to shake, over and over, accompanied by ear-splitting explosive noises, continual fountains of fire, and a blast of scalding air.

Her host body had frozen in shock and terror, cowering in a copse of trees, at the first huge noise, and at first Calixte didn’t notice the falling flakes. They were grey, fine, like the ash of a fire. Ash? Ash was falling from the sky? Soon the ash was accompanied by tiny sparks of fire, most of which landed and swiftly winked out.

But not all. Calixte’s horror grew, as more and more of the falling sparks set tiny fires, fires which grew, and consumed, and grew together. Soon there were small fires everywhere she turned her attention, dotting the valley and blistering the air.

Then the flaming rocks began to fall from the sky, which was so dark now as to resemble the depths of the night, and screaming, burning, terrified people erupted from the valleys above and fled back toward the city. Already her host body had climbed to such a height that she could turn her attention down over most of the by-now collapsed roofs of the city, saving only the Palace, into the harbour.

Dozens of ships, she saw, were stranded on bare sand and rock. The ocean had retreated far back from the city, and she could barely make out a far, far curl of water.

Tsunami. The earth-shaking rage of the Great Mother Goddess had caused the sea to draw back from the land, and before long, it would come rushing back, streaming far inland, drowning and crushing all in its path.

Fire. Flood. Earthquake. What other disaster could befall her beloved city?

Above her, the burning mountain seemed determined to provide an answer to her anguished question. As though determined to outdo all previous efforts, a clap of sound mightier than any other yet before rolled across the tremor-wracked island, and the entire top of the mountain exploded in a rain of flaming, molten rocks, ash, and smoke. Body-sized chunks of stone, glowing red and streaming steam, thudded to the ground, burning and crushing all in their paths as they tumbled down.

The copse of trees where her host body had stopped seemed miraculously untouched by all the disasters so far; no fire bloomed in its branches, nor cracks slashed the ground. Calixte hoped the tsunami would not be powerful enough to smash this far up, but it was a faint hope and she knew it. And what might happen when the chill waters of the sea hit the burning rocks? Would the fires be extinguished, or would something even more catastrophic happen?

She turned her attention back up the hillside, and her heart seemed to leap into her throat as an ominous rumble reached her ears. Around a curve of crumbling rock, an angry red glow appeared, followed by a wide ribbon of molten rock. It oozed slowly, inexorably pouring over all that stood in its path, and as she watched, it seemed even the apparently slow motion was a deception. The burning stone engulfed the last stragglers of the people attempting to return to the city via this valley, rolling them under. Tiny fires seemed to flare in the very air itself as the heat of the oncoming rock ignited the falling ash.

Calixte thought she had been horrified before. Had this been her body, she would have been on her knees, prostrate and ill with terror. It was as if the gods had gone mad, ripping the island of Atlantis to shreds, but she knew better.

This was the wrath of the king of the Fair Folk. This, her pride had wrought, or his; the destruction of her home, her people, her land. Everything she had loved was falling to this onslaught of the worst nature had to offer. Calamity upon calamity, brought upon innocent people, guilty of nothing but the crime of being her people.