"Books - David Eddings - Belgarath the Sorcerer" - читать интересную книгу автора (Eddings David)

put it bluntly, went crazy. The madness of man is bad enough, but the
madness of a God? Horrible!

Driven to desperation, my Master's brother took that ultimate step that
only his madness would have suggested to him. He knew what would
happen. There is no way that he could not have known. Nonetheless,
faced with the extermination of all of Angarak, he raised the Orb. His
control of my Master's Orb was tenuous at best, but he raised it all
the same.

And with it, he cracked the world.

The sound was like no sound I had ever heard before--or have heard
since. It was the sound of tearing rock. To this very day I still
start up from a sound sleep, sweating and trembling, as the memory of
that dreadful sound echoes down to me through five millennia.

The Melcenes, who are quite competent geologists, described what really
happened to the world when Torak broke it apart. My own studies
confirm their theories. The core of the world is still molten, and
that primeval proto continent which we all thought so firm, actually
floated on that seething underground sea of liquid rock, not unlike a
raft.

Torak used the Orb to break the strings that held the raft together. In
his desperation to save his Angaraks, he split the crust of that huge
landmass apart so that the rest of mankind could not complete the
destruction of his children. The crack he made was miles wide, and the
molten rock from far below began to spurt up through that awful
chasm.

In itself, that would have been catastrophic enough--but then the sea
poured into the newly created fissure. Believe me, you don't want to
spill cold water on boiling rock!

The whole thing exploded!

I would not even venture to guess how many people died when that
happened--half of mankind at the very least, and probably far more. Had
the geography of eastern Korim been more gentle, in all probability the
Marags and Nyissans would have drowned or wound up living in Mallorea.
At any rate, the world we had known ended in that instant.

Torak paid a very dear price for what he had done, however. The Orb
was not at all happy to be used in the way he used it. Belsambar had
been right: Torak had seen fire in his future, and the Orb gave him
fire. As it happened, he raised the Orb with his left hand, and after
he cracked the world, he didn't have a left hand any more. The Orb
burned it down to cinders. Then, as if to emphasize its discontent, it
boiled out his left eye and melted down the left side of his face just