A cycle of ashes and fire...

On page 59 of Callaso's 'The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony', Coronis, the beautiful daughter of King Phlegyas, is reduced to ashes.

The story of Coronis' perceived unfaithfulness to Apollo and his ensuing jealousy is a familiar one. Apollo, struck by the radiance of mortal Coronis as she bathed in Lake Boebis, swelled with desire and, as Calasso writes, 'descended upon (her) like the night.' It is a compulsiveness and lack of control that could be considered unusual for Apollo, and, perhaps as a result, sets into motion a string of events that is wholly unnatural, beginning first and foremost with Asclepius.
Pried out of his mother from her funeral pyre and coaxed into life by Apollo, Asclepius was tutored by the centaur Chiron, who had or would soon tutor Aristaeus, Ajax, Aeneas, Actaeon, Caeneus, Theseus, Achilles, Jason, Peleus, Telamon, Perseus, Heracles, Oileus, and Phoenix. The string of names Asclepius' tutelage by Chiron is shared in spans in some way every nook and corner of every classic myth ever set down. It's little wonder then, that with his knowledge would come the eventual ability to break the boundary of the living and dead through healing such as neither heaven or earth had ever witnessed before. It logically follows, too, that such power could not be allowed to stay in the hands of mortals. Hades, feeling slighted, convinces Zeus to vaporize Asclepius with a thunderbolt.
And Apollo weeps. His tears, as Calasso writes on page 59, fall as amber into (where else?) Eridanus, a river of both the mortal and divine, where Phaeton fell after being smote by Zeus for passing too close and setting the world on fire as he sped between the spheres of heaven and earth on his father's chariot.

And, as Calasso states on Page 59, the 'divine fire' hardly stops there. Semele, a mortal madly loved by Zeus and thus watched with simmering rage by Hera, is killed by lightning and fire when, as Ovid writes in his Metamorphosis, a disguised Hera whispers to her:

"Many, pretending to be gods, have found entrance into modest chambers. But to be Zeus is not enough; make him prove his love ... as great and glorious as he is when welcomed by Hera, so great and glorious, pray him grant you his embrace ..."

And she is toasted. And here, as with Apollo and Coronis, Zeus, filled with sudden realization of what is growing inside his mortal lover, snatches out the unborn child--here Dionysis--and saves his life.

Calasso writes, on page 59, that 'the divine fire devours those venturing outside the human sphere..."

At the beginning of page 59, A quote from Pindar is linked to Coronis, stating "The craziest type of people are those who scorn what they have around them and look elsewhere / vainly searching for what cannot exist." Coronis wasn't searching, however; she was retreating. Against her consent, she had been pulled out of her sphere and into the mouth of that divine fire. To be attracted to Ischys was to seek shelter from it, but as her coming doom would tell, and as Semele's doom before and her son Asclepius' doom after, there is no escape once the sphere has been broken. That fire crosses all boundaries and ducks under all logic to set right what has been tipped out of place.