I can't have read very attentively at all the first time round, I don't remember this story! Anyway, I did stumble a bit over one parsing: "the world ceased to be in a blast of fire so bright", etc., initially read as if the world ceased to be-located-in a blast of fire -- I think perhaps I leapt to that at first because the intransitive existential sense of "be" is rather rarer than other meanings.