The ground beneath his left foot frosted first and then the frost spread outward, moving across the rocky terrain in a widening ring, and in the distance, far beyond where he could see clearly, the same process was propagating at scale, the extreme cold radiating outward from him in a direction and a distance that told him something about what was actually being released.
His right side went hot.
The opposite extreme, equally total, the right half of his body burning at a temperature that turned the rock beneath his right foot soft almost immediately and then liquid, a pool of melted stone forming and spreading outward.
And in the far distance on the right side of the field the ground was shifting and cracking and in places opening as the heat propagated through the substrata and expressed itself in the way that extreme heat expressed itself in geological material.
