Oris Granum Psallo

This is kind of a special piece to me. I think I'll end up giving somebody a print of it, but I'm not sure who yet.

My personal interpretation:
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The piece starts on the right, with humble yet vibrant origins. There is harvest, joy and celebration.
Then the two paths in the piece diverge.
The lower path enjoys pleasant shifting hues, and eventually fades into time, as all things eventually do.
The upper path begins with a flourish of color, and is then consumed by darkness. Pain and fear resonate in the path, obscuring hope, but not forever. Eventually the upper path breaks free of the shroud, and shines forth with the purest light in the piece. White light contains all colors in unison, balanced. At the end of the piece we see that the light shining forth on the upper path is also beginning to fade, but it has not yet vanished, and the hope of continuity and rebirth is not dispelled.
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Technical information:
~created in Apophysis
The design in itself isn't terribly complex, but it was tricky to get it right.
The rendering on the other hand.... well, that was a beast. The nature of this flame has a very dilute background on the left hand side. I didn't want it to be super grainy, so I set the quality density to 200,000! For those of you who don't use Apophysis regularly, the default maximum suggested density 4,000. The piece in full resolution isn't huge, 2560x1440, but the rendering took 9 hours on my beastly i7 quad-core with 12 gigs of DDR3. Yeah, I know those stats aren't as impressive as they were 2 years ago.
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Anyway, I'm happy with this fractal, and I hope you like it too.