RISING FROM DHARAN-TUN, WE sank toward Eue, sailing over miles of endless bog and low hills. There were no mountains, no rivers, no seas. Syriani had said that time did not pass on Eue. It seemed geologically true, at least. From our great height, the planet seemed dead, unchanging and eternal. Nothing lived there, nothing grew—unless it was the slime molds that choked the waterways with yellow and deathly green. Above those strangled wastes stretched tablelands of gray sand, the flatness relieved only occasionally by broken ridges of stone.

“Yukajji-kih!” cried the vayadan-general Aulamn to me. “You will see a thing unseen by your degenerate kind! You should count yourself blessed.”

I said nothing to it, but stood silent and in chains beside the great prince, who was silent as I. Our shadow heralded our coming, its broken-ring shape cast upon the wastes below. Looking back and up through the arched glass overhead, I could see the other ships of our train descending, not shocking the air but sliding neatly into Eue’s atmosphere. And I could see Dharan-Tun above, its face white and deceptively shining. No sign was there of pits or foundries, or of the torments that lay beneath that frozen hell of a world.

“There’s nothing . . .” I heard myself say, and shut my mouth to keep from saying more. The place reminded me—in its way—of Annica, formless and void.

Aulamn hissed, its metal pinions flexing dangerously. I feared the beast would strike me, as others of its kind had done for perceived blasphemies, but its master’s presence stayed its hand.

“Sim ejaan,” my host replied. “Not nothing. Look!”

We were flying low then, the wind of our passage rippling the slimy pools and strangled waterways below. Ahead, the horizon shimmered, and above its shine a black shape arose. The marshlands fell away, and at last we came upon a great expanse of sand the color of charcoal. The dunescape stretched from horizon to horizon, black as shale, clogged here and there with a snot-like growth of fungus. So vast it was I thought it must have been the bed of some long-vanished sea.

A gift, indeed.

The black mass on the horizon reared higher and higher as we approached, seeming to grow with each passing instant, rising from a blur at the margin of the world to a dark line of hills. From hills to mountains. How tall those mountains were I dared not guess, for each time I tried I realized how far our ships had yet to go. So flat was that barren emptiness that distance collapsed, became meaningless. The mountains might have been ten miles away or two hundred. And so I could not guess, not until we came beneath their shadow.

Lower we flew above the sands until we raked tracks across the desert with our passage. The mountains rose above the level of the desert plain, miles high and dozens of miles across. The closer we came, the more certain I was of one thing and one thing only: the mountains could not be a natural part of the landscape. Still distant as we were, I could see how flat and featureless were their gray-green faces, rising sheer as castle walls from the sand. What was more, there was nothing on Eue to suggest the tectonic forces required to uplift such a mass of stone. Featureless as the planet’s face was, I guessed its geologic heart was cold and dead as the creatures who once had built upon its surface.

They were impossible. The mountains could not be real.

How can I impress their size upon you with mere words? The weight and shadow of them, their soaring pinnacles and sheer faces hung over the world in a way that flattened all who beheld them. The very clouds of Eue bent at their presence and pooled about their crowns. Not even the Storm Wall on Berenike was so mighty.

“There!” the Prophet exclaimed, and pointed with an open hand. “There are gathered the princes of the blood-clans! See you their banners?”

I opened my mouth to respond but remained silent. I did not see, not at first. I had not looked low enough. “I do,” I said at last. Tall and narrow banners rose on masts like the ceremonial spears carried by an Aeta’s coteliho, its herald. A sea of greens and blues, of whites and blacks arrayed themselves on the fields before the mountain wall, still so remote that each stood no taller than a grain of rice. And nowhere was there a hint of red, a shout of yellow gold. No spark of orange or splash of umber, but every blue and violet the imagination might conjure was there in residence. I fancied even some of the blacks were ultraviolet to Cielcin eyes.

They did not perceive color as we.

Reminded of this, I looked round at the blackness of that dark vessel. Was it dark to them? Or were there hidden patterns, secret designs in subtle hues no human eye could see? That thought only heightened my sense of alienation.

“How many clans are there?” I asked.

“Thousands!” answered Vati.

“Only thirteen,” Dorayaica replied, its answer cowing the general to quiet. By way of explanation, it added, “So many fractures, so many branchings.” There was a gravelly note in the creature’s voice I was coming to recognize as melancholy. As regret.

As shame.

That word, uatanyya, branchings, plucked a string in my memory. “Aranata Otiolo,” I said, drawing glances from the Great One and its holy slaves. “Aranata Otiolo called itself the Lord of the Seventeenth Branching.”

The Prophet’s eyes closed slowly. Aulamn made a mechanical screeching, part cry and part curse. “Betrayer!” it shouted. “Deceiver! Otiolo brought corrosion upon the blood-clans! It slew Utaiharo. It was vayadan and should have known its place!” The chimera struck the column nearest it with an iron pinion, sending a cascade of sparks showering down the side of the dais. Severine and the other MINOS servants flinched. “You did well to slaughter it!”

“The line of Utaiharo stretched back to before the time of Araxaika the Almost-Blessed,” Syriani said, apparently unaffected by the winged chimera’s display. “It was an old line, only seventeen times broken by violence since the days of Elu. Otiolo should have shown respect.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

Syriani’s eyes opened sharply, and though I could not distinguish iris from pupil I knew they fixed upon my face. “You are a student of your own history, are you not? Know you not that when dynasties fall, they fracture? Great empires becoming little kingdoms in the rubble, ruled by those lieutenants and heirs who survive the chaos? That chaos is uatanyr, is a branching.” It glanced to Vati and to brooding Aulamn. “My vayadayan will die if they kill me. Your sorcerers have made it so.”

“Never!” Vati hastened to say, and prostrated itself before its master. “Never, Great One!”

Almost lovingly, Syriani Dorayaica stepped on the back of its subordinate’s head. Keeping its foot there, it looked down at me, eyes narrowing. “Your conquest, Otiolo, was bound to Utaiharo as vayadan. Its betrayal was dunyasu. Blasphemy. Where Utaiharo had been, there were others. Otiolo, Prince of Sacrilege. Ajimma. Tuanolo. Raiazu.” It counted these on its fingers. “A branching. Chaos.” It hissed, and released Vati from beneath its foot.

I chewed on this revelation a moment, watching Vati rise—still bowing to its master. “Diadochi,” I said at last.

The Great One cocked its head. “I do not know this word.”

Smiling with the reversal, I said, “It is an old word.” The irony was not lost on the Prophet, whose face betrayed no amusement. “It means successor, specifically the successors of a very ancient emperor. Alexander, we called him. Our Elu . . . in a sense. They were his generals, and divided his kingdom when he died.”

Syriani twitched its head in that way which signaled yes among its kind, and brushed past Vati to look out the window once more. The sheer greenish faces of the mountains filled all our view, the colored banners snapping in the wind had grown large as fingers. “Each itani, each blood-clan may trace its lineage back through each uatanyr to one of Elu’s first Aetane. To one of his Diadochi, you might say.” The Greek word sounded foul in the xenobite’s mouth. “You are Aeta of the Eighteenth Branching of the House of Zahaka, who was Aeta to Elu. Twice six and six.” Switching to its native tongue then, Syriani spoke to Vati. “Give the order to land in line with the gates and have the others form a line to either side of us. Fan out. Show them our numbers. I would have the others understand why it is Dorayaica has the right to call them here.”

The general bowed and—still bent—signaled the crew who piloted the shuttle via its implants. Or so I gathered, for at once our flight began to slow and circle to the right, sliding across the airs on droning repulsors, kicking up great black clouds of dust.

Without warning, a short laugh escaped my nose. I stifled it, but too late.

“Dein?” Syriani asked.

“Twice six and six!” I laughed, realizing I could never explain the importance of that number or its relation to the emblems of my house.

Eighteen. Three sixes.

“It is nothing,” I said, amazed that I could still laugh, if only at so trifling a coincidence.

Or so strange an omen.

Taking me at my word, the Prophet almost shrugged as it turned away to address Aulamn. “Iamarara o-scaharimn wananuri ti-jattin!” it said, ordering the general to ready its guards. “We are here!”

No ramp.

Still in chains, I stood well behind Syriani Dorayaica on a lift platform in the bowels of the prince’s landing barge. The generals Vati and Aulamn bracketed their master like a pair of unmatched chess pieces. Behind me, Severine stood silently by, surrounded by a half-dozen other MINOS personnel in suits of gray or black. About us stood assembled some two hundred of the Prophet’s scahari warriors, their scimitars drawn, long handles tucked against the crooks of their right arms, their shining nahute coiled and ready on their hips.

Almost I felt as if I were crowded into the lift in the coliseum, sweating and muttering with the myrmidons before a fight. I looked round. No sign of Pallino and Elara, nor of Siran, of Ghen . . . of Switch. The only human faces were of Severine and her companions—and so there were no true human faces at all.

If I expected any great words or lordly remark, I was disappointed. The great clan-chief of the blood-clan Dorayaica was silent again. One of the lesser warriors let out a cry, and above us the low, red lights—which I guessed seemed bright and pale to the xenobites—cycled blue. The platform beneath lurched, and with a rattling clangor like the turning of some immeasurable clock, we descended, hurtling smoothly to the ground.

Stale wind rushed up about us, carrying black sand like cold cinders that stung my exposed face. I was surprised I could breathe, truth be told, and guessed the algaes and the expanses of lurid fungal molds we’d crossed to reach this place had something to do with it. The whole place stank of brimstone and decay, of the static bite of desolation.

Of the tomb.

A white-robed coteliho marched forward, brandishing its heraldic spear tipped with the broken circle motif common to all Cielcin heraldry, beneath it the White Hand in a ring worked in silver. Behind it went two scahari, MINOS-built chimeras, white-limbed and white-armored, each carrying a tall, slim sable banner with the device of the Hand painted between Cielcin glyphs.

I had no eyes for them, nor for the triple column of Pale warriors, black-armored and cloaked in the Dorayaica black and royal azure that followed.

I had eyes only for the mountains.

Unhampered now by the windows of the landing barge and unhindered by the low-hanging clouds, I could look up from where I stood inside the circling embrace of the shuttle’s two horns to where the peaks of the mountains rose, strangely square and regular, to battle the thin, gray sky.

They were no peaks, nor any mountains.

They were ramparts.

What I had taken for the sheer faces of mountains rising near at right angles from the gray-black sand were nothing of the kind. They were walls. Five miles high they stood, crowned with square towers, their heights decorated with pillared arcades and trapezoidal arches hundreds of feet high. How thick they were and how wide the space they encircled might be I could hardly estimate, for they marched from horizon to horizon.

I could see so little of it from the ground that its full plan and form were obscure. I guessed—but could not then be certain—that the structure formed a great ring about a vast and desolate plain, or that the ring wall itself was the city of which Syriani and Severine had spoken. I could see only twin horns of that open circle—that broken circle—broken as the head of every staff carried by every herald of the Pale, as though that great ruin and wall were a thumb and forefinger held half an inch apart.

Between them there was only sand, and beyond—within the great circle of the wall—those lone and level sands stretched to the edge of vision. From the ground, the far side of the ring city could be seen only as a gray-green blur across the lower reaches of the sky.

“The Enar built this?” I asked in wonder, and froze in awe of the scale, the sheer Olympian magnitude of all that greenish stone. No one answered, but I knew it must be so. Humanity could scarce have built such a temple, and the Cielcin? The Cielcin did not build up.

It was not in the Quiet’s shadow that the Cielcin had grown to maturity—in tunnels on Se Vattayu as I had once believed—but in the shadow of these Enar, these First servants of their dark gods. Here. On Eue. At Akterumu.

I was wrong.

A cry went up, high and thin and ululating, rising and falling from Earth only knew how many thousand inhuman throats. Beneath the banners ahead and to either side of the great opening, I saw the waving of white swords and the flash of lances. Blue banners fluttered in that universe of gray green. Thousands of the Pale stood massed to either side, waving their arms and their flags beneath the slim spires of drop towers and the indescribable shapes of shuttlecraft. Most wore the battle masks or black visored helmets common to their kind, but where the creatures who served Dorayaica wore their masks white and unadorned, these were garishly painted, striped and whorled with devices I could not understand, markers of clan allegiance that Valka and I might have spent a lifetime deciphering.

They watched us through eyeslits narrow as coin slots to guard against the sun. Others wore heavy goggles and bared glassy fangs while still more—the poorest, most downtrodden of the ietumna, I guessed—squinted in the thin light of Eue’s weak sun.

Few—like Syriani—wore no mask or helmet. But the Prophet seemed unaffected by the light. I caught myself wondering if it wore some manner of lens beneath its nictitating membranes, or else if MINOS had lavished some of their art upon the dread lord.

At a gesture from the great prince, my honor guard of four still-fleshly warriors dragged me forward. They shoved me to my knees beside Prince Syriani, who spared me a moment’s glance before turning to peer up at the twin towers rising from either side of the vast bulwark.

“Akterumu,” the great prince said. “City of the Enar. See them there?” It gestured with its horned crown at huge, crude images hewn half a mile high on the face of the mighty walls.

How can I describe their shape? Those images worn down by the passage of so many aeons? Crab-like they were, bodies flat and squashed, supported by crooked limbs—four or six or eight—no two seemed alike. I saw no sign of eyes nor shape of head, and here and there they carried weapons in pincered hands. The bas-reliefs showed them conquering other creatures, things stranger and more hideous even than they. Rank upon rank of jagged writing ran along above and below the figures, no doubt describing the feats of those ancient conquerors in lurid detail.

“Why didn’t you destroy their images?” I asked, thinking of the Prophet’s own murals depicting the story of its people in abstract form. “Are they not of the Lie?”

“They are reminders, Oimn Belu,” Syriani replied. “The Enar were unworthy to be anything but our heralds. Their failure reminds us to keep faith.” It looked down on me, face strangely placid. Thoughtful? “Akterumu is a monument to their shame, their failure—and our glory.”

The great prince stood still as stone a moment, face turned up in contemplation of those mighty sculptures. It seemed to be awaiting its place in the marching column, and that I was to accompany it in its time. “The baetayan say that Miudanar ordered the city protected, that Elu forbade the desecration himself. But the treasures of Akterumu! These he took for his own. Their weapons. Their machines. These made us strong.”

I nodded, imagining those ancient Cielcin landing here, emerging from their ark into the dim but blinding sunlight. “Did Elu conquer them? The Enar, I mean.”

The great prince gathered its black cloak about itself to shield against the wind. “Veih,” it answered me. “No. They were dead and gone to dust while my people yet gnawed bones in the dark beneath Se Vattayu.”

“What happened to them?” I asked, still squinting up at the reliefs. The Enar’s arms—legs, whatever—looked armored, segmented as the carapace of certain of the Exalted appeared. Before the prince could answer, I asked, “Were they machines?”

“I do not know,” Syriani replied. “They are gone, and there are none now who know save the gods alone.” I turned from my contemplation of the ruin and looked into Syriani’s face. The great prince of the Cielcin shaded its delicate eyes with a hand as it studied the ruins. “When Elu first came here, it is said the halls were filled with wonders. Weapons. Machines. They are gone now. Destroyed. Taken by the tribes. But that was so long ago. So little remains. The blood-clans destroyed much to build what you see.” It jerked its head in the direction of space, at the consortium of moons that littered Eue’s pale and bloodless sky.

Was that sorrow in the great prince’s voice? Trying to understand Cielcin emotions was still like trying to discern shadows on a pool of ink. I felt a pang of sorrow myself, seeing in the Prophet a distorted image of my own reflection. It pined for lost antiquity as I did, and saw in the grandeur of that ancient pile of stone something worth understanding—Lie or no. I felt it too, as I’d felt it standing above the crag at Calagah, or in the yard outside Fort Din when the Irchtani first soared overhead. It was the same wonder that lit Valka’s face when she first stepped into the Great Library at Colchis.

Almost I could imagine we might have been friends. In another life, in a world where perhaps our kinds could reconcile to one another. What tales we might have told, what things learned of one another had we spent our passage in talk and not in torment.

Torment.

The memory of my torment came rushing back, and the sorrow curdled to scorn. Shutting my eyes, I turned from the Pale prince and back to the walls and the army of white demons clustered about their base. I opened them again, peering over the heads and the forest of swords and lances to the gray desert beyond that mighty gate.

“It is a loss,” the prince lamented, and a rush of wind escaped its four nostrils like a sigh. “What wonders we might have learned had we not been so quick to grow.”

“Those who wreak destruction and call it progress are ever enemies of eternity . . .” I said, and spared another glance for my host. “And truth.”

The prince hissed and raised two clawed fingers to admonish me. “Have a care, kinsman. It is my people you speak of now.”

Cold though my blood ran, I turned and faced the prince squarely. “You’re a race of scavengers,” I said, barely containing a sneer. “Thieves. Vandals. You’ve created nothing. Everything you have you took or were given. Your ships, your technology—this world. Your very faith.” I almost spat at the prince’s feet, so fey a mood was on me. “Even your Elu. What did Elu achieve save to stand upon this grave of a world and call itself tall?” I did spit then. “And you call us rats!”

I did not see the blow until it was too late. Syriani Dorayaica did not snarl, did not telegraph its motion in any way. One taloned hand lashed out and caught me across the face. The boy who once had snapped so at his father hit the sand with a crash and a rattle of chains.

The pain came a moment later, white and searing across the left side of my face. Hot blood ran down into my eye. Struggling to my knees, I blinked it back, feeling the torn flesh with my fingers—suddenly conscious of the missing ones as the empty part of my right glove flapped against my face. Pain flared red as my fingers found the wounds: five deep channels slashed across my left cheek and jaw. I tasted blood, and realized one of the talons had pierced clean through my cheek.

My eye had been spared by microns.

In further retaliation, the Prophet spurned me with its heel, and I fell back upon the sand gasping. Flat on my back, the Cielcin lord looked down on me. “Do not blaspheme in this holy place,” it said. “I will have your tongue removed. You do not need it any longer. I have thus far permitted you to retain it as a courtesy. Do not try me again.”

It held out a hand to one side, palm up. Expectant. Interpreting the gesture, one of my guards shuffled toward its master. Syriani barked an order, and the creature handed my chain into the prince’s hand.

It turned and started walking without another word, following its troops toward the mighty opening that stretched between those two towers of the gods. Dragged behind it, I managed to lurch and stumble my way back to my feet. Blood sheeted down my torn cheek, and the stinging sand caught in the wounds, making me wince. Long hair stuck to my face, and so great were the tall creature’s strides that I had to jog to keep up.

What a sight I must have been, bloodied and wild-eyed like some chieftain of the Germans dragged to Rome. The Prophet’s warriors marched to either side, seeming almost to glide over the sands. The other Cielcin tribes each kept their distance. Some dipped their pennons as the great prince approached, others bellowed. In greeting? Or in challenge? I was perversely glad of the columns of scahari marching to either side and of the white-armored chimeras that marched at intervals among their still-fleshy compatriots. The slavering horde—there were thousands of them—seemed as though at any moment they might spill over whatever unseen line of decorum or fear held them back and crush us. I felt as I had at Arae, trapped in a column between the hammer and the anvil.

Ahead, the column bent right and made for the gates of the tower. A huge portal stood open, with neither door nor portcullis. The foremost of Syriani’s soldiers had gained that doorway and vanished beyond up a huge and arcing stair to the vast warren within. Still jogging on behind the tall prince, it was easy to imagine those ancient Cielcin flowering here, in halls and darkened galleries. How many stories were there? How many thousands of miles of corridors and of rooms? The ring-city was vaster than any city of man. Once it might have been home to millions of the Pale. Now it was empty, filled only when the blood-clans met in moot.

As we approached the level of the gate and turned, I was accorded at last a view of the desert beyond the perimeter of the Enar ruins unobstructed by the Pale horde. Chained though I was to the Prince of Princes, I lingered, transfixed. So great was the circumference of that ruinous circle that I could not resolve its far side. The curve of Eue bent away, reducing the square-capped ramparts and inhuman crenellations that crowned the wall to the flat gray of distant mountains, so that the forbidden lands within that great ring seemed the bottom of some god’s bowl roofed in sky. Or like the floor of some immeasurable arena. Where the outside of the wall was sheer and decorated with mighty reliefs of Enar conquest, the interior was terraced, stepped and segmented, with lesser walls running within parallel to the outer fastness, their faces dotted with trapezoidal windows, betraying chambers within. Inner towers and bridges, colonnades and arched galleries marched along the inner circumference of the ruin, as though the wall were some gutted beast whose urban innards spilled onto the plain.

I had lingered too long in wonderment, and Syriani pulled my chain. Surprised, wrongfooted, I lurched and fell a second time, sprawling in the black dust.

It didn’t matter.

It didn’t matter because I had seen it before. I had known I must see it, that I must come to it in the end. My end. I knew that before long I must cross that final threshold and the desert beyond.

The land within was dead and flat as glass, unrelieved by hill or gully. Nothing grew in that uttermost desolation—not even the slimes that colored the landscape outside. There was nothing there, nothing but a forest of slim pillars, each wrought of the same greenish stone as the great miles-high city itself. How short they seemed, though each was surely a thousand feet high, so dwarfed were they by the surrounding ringed city. At a glance, the pillars appeared placed without plan, not in rows or columns. Later, when I would look out upon that plain from a terrace on the lower reaches of the city rings above, I would learn the ancient builders had arranged their pillars in broad spirals which processed from the dome in the precise center of the plain.

And yet not one pillar stood between the great gates of the outer wall and the black dome at its heart. Careful planning had left an avenue from the level of the two towers all the way to the dome, so broad that an army might march half a hundred men abreast along its length. It had been wrought for creatures larger than we, larger than the Cielcin. I tried to picture those tank-like crabs stomping, scuttling over the fused flagstones to the dome and shrine more than a dozen miles away.

Still bleeding from my torn face, I half-rose as the great prince tugged on my chain, my ruined shoulder crying out with pain. Gasping, I found my knees, and fell again as Syriani tugged at me. Face in the dust. It took a measure of doing to get my hands under me, to shake off the jeering and the shouts of the xenobites all around.

“Aeta ba-Yukajjimn wo!” one shouted, mocking.

“Yukajji! Yukajji!”

“Aeta ba-Yukajjimn ne? Aeta ba-Gaunun!”

Warka shanatim madatim itteche en.

“Gau! Gau wo!”

“Gau wo! Psanete wo!”

Teche!

On my knees again, I turned slowly. In among the jeers and the animal babble were words I did not know. A voice deep and dark as space, whispering as if at my ear. I turned sharply, half-expecting to find one of my captors by me. But I was alone. Syriani had dragged me across perhaps a dozen feet of black sand, leaving a disturbed trench in my wake. I was alone.

Ana mahriya teche!

I turned my head sharply left, following the voice along the avenue to the dome and shrine about which the Enar had ordered their universe. As I looked, the distance seemed to contract, the shrine growing larger in my vision—in my mind—as if some fell art altered the focal length of my eye to magnify the fate that was coming to me. I could see the steps, could almost see the iron ring to which I would be chained and sacrificed. In the vision it was all I could ever see. I had never truly seen the place before, never seen it as any more than shadows in a dream.

I saw it then with eyes unclouded, saw the dome and the place where the Quiet showed me I must die again beneath the rounded entrance to that black temple.

The entrance . . . the entrance!

What I had always taken for a simple circular arch was no such thing. It was no arch at all, but the orbit of a single, monstrous eye. So too the dome was no dome, but the smooth crown of a massive skull a thousand feet or more in diameter, its substance rippled and shining as obsidian glass.

Akterumu was not akumn ba-terun as I had first thought so long ago. It was akute ba-rumumn. The Shrine of the Skull.

I began to shake.

That single, lifeless eye held my gaze, the yawning emptiness within it calling out to me across the desert and the sea of pillars: a sucking void that filled me with a crawling horror until I felt certain I must scream. I could not shut my eyes, even though the sand stung them and tears ran. Still kneeling, my hands shook, rattling my chains. I could not stop them. It was all I could do to curl my tortured hands into fists, but that only set my whole body shaking.

It was one of the Watchers—or had been once. Of that I was certain. Indeed, here was the very head of Miudanar, the Dreamer. That which summoned Elu across the vast emptiness of space to serve it, that which had taught its Cielcin thralls to fly.

Even dead, its malevolence lingered, and I felt its gaze pin me to the sands. These ancient Enar had built their city—their entire world—to consecrate and hallow the corpse of their terrific god. The whole of that ringed city—the whole of Eue, in a sense—was its tomb. How many aeons had it lain broken and rotting in the desert? Its flesh wasted away, bones picked clean with the scouring sands?

Teche!

The ungodly voice crashed over me like thunder, and though the language was strange and the meaning beyond all hope of human comprehension, I felt the black joy of its malice all the same. I would later spy its ribs and vertebrae rising from the dust of the plain and marvel at the cosmic scale of it. It must have stood a mile high once, if stand were the right word, for surely so vast a creature must ply the black waves of space, for any gravity must crush so weighty an organism.

Whence had it come? Syriani had said the creatures were older than the universe, that the Quiet—which the Prophet claimed was the author of creation itself—had trapped its dark gods in fleshly prisons, but surely that could not be. Yet though my mind rejected it, my eyes could not but believe. Here then was one of the vile creatures that had warred—would war—with the Quiet across eternity. Creature of an older universe it was, or of the boiling chaos beyond creation, terrible even in death.

Ammarka!

A white pain flared behind my eyes, and I felt a sensation of fingers—nematodes slithering across the white matter of my brain. Hands seized me. Cielcin hands. I hardly felt them.

I hardly felt anything.