But even stratospheric flight would not provide them with safety from his master’s work on the weather now. As it stood, the cloud he had summoned now towered up to the stratosphere as well, compressing and flattening out against that layer of the atmosphere into a domed shape evocative of an anvil. And even this outermost layer of the slowly rotating supercell system was unnatural; these outer clouds were as dark outside as they no doubt were on the inside, and lightning freely coursed through it and lit it from within as the entire formation boiled with raw power. One would need to have a death wish to fly a ship into that.