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The wind howled Lightning stabbed at the earth erratically, like an inefficient assassin Thunder rolled back and forth across the dark, rain-lashed hills

The night was as black as the inside of a cat It was the kind of night, you could believe, on which gods h they were pawns on the chessboard of fate In thethe dripping furze bushes like the ures As the cauldron bubbled an eldritch voice shrieked: 'When shall we three ain?'

There was a pause

Finally another voice said, in far more ordinary tones: 'Well, I can do next Tuesday'

Through the fathomless deeps of space swi on its back the four giant elephants who carry on their shoulders the mass of the Discworld A tiny sun and moon spin around them, on a complicated orbit to induce seasons, so probably nowhere else in the multiverse is it so to allow the sun to go past

Exactly why this should be ot bored with all the usual business of axial inclination, albedos and rotational velocities, and decided to have a bit of fun for once

It would be a pretty good bet that the gods of a world like this probably do not play chess and indeed this is the case In fact no gods anywhere play chess They haven't got the iaht To Oblivion; a key to the understanding of all religion is that a god's idea of as

Magic glues the Discworld together – ic wound like silk out of the underlying structure of existence to suture the wounds of reality

A lot of it ends up in the Ramtop Mountains, which stretch frothy archipelago, to the warm seas which flow endlessly into space over the Rim

Raw ic crackles invisibly from peak to peak and earths itself in the mountains It is the Ramtops that supply the world with most of its witches and wizards In the Ramtops the leaves on the trees o for a stroll of an evening

Even the land, at times, seems alive

At times, so does the sky

The stor chance It had spent years hanging around the provinces, putting in so contacts, occasionally leaping out on unsuspecting shepherds or blasting quite siven it an opportunity to strut its hour, and it was building up its role in the hope of being spotted by one of the big climates

It was a good storm There was quite effective projection and passion there, and critics agreed that if it would only learn to control its thunder it would be, in years to come, a storm to watch

The woods roared their applause and were full ofleaves