Undermind

On a frigid spring morning in Sæbø, Norway, nineteen-year-old Alice Wendle met the large, scruffy-looking young man who introduced himself as Calbert Bitterbee. Alice had taken a gap year before university to go hiking with her boyfriend Hamish in Northern Europe. She and Hamish had just had an enormous fight about toothpaste, of all things, and he’d driven off in their rental vehicle with all of her belongings, leaving her stranded in this little tourist village on the shore of the picturesque Hjørund Fjord.

Enter Calbert Bitterbee. Calbert came to the rescue of the young woman shivering on the roadside, and offered to drive her to Ålesund, where she could take stock and make a decision on whether to call a very early halt to her disaster of a sabbatical. Alice, against her better judgement, accepted his offer.

This could be the beginning of any number of horror stories. Naive young tourist accepts the helping hand of a kindly stranger, who promptly shoves her into the boot of his car and takes her to a cabin in the woods, where the heads of his previous victims adorn the mantelpiece.

But that’s not what happened in this story. This story became, for a time, a sappy romance.

Calbert—or Cal, as Alice took to calling him—was mysterious and intensely alluring, like the male lead in every awful bodice ripper she’d never admit to having read. His blonde hair, grey eyes and towering frame hinted at a Scandinavian heritage, but he didn’t talk like one who had grown up in Norway. He spoke English with an accent that was hard to pin down. And the words that came out of his mouth sounded like poetry to her ears, even though she often had no idea what he was talking about. It didn’t matter. She could have blissfully listened to him recite the pages of a phone book. When he asked if she wanted to go on a detour into the Sunnmøre Alps with him, she said yes without a second thought.

One thing led to another, and by the time they came down from the mountains, Alice had a new boyfriend and travelling companion, and Hamish was a half-remembered belly ache. Alice and Cal set out together on a sacred mission to wear out the springs of squeaky hostel bunks across Norway. Neither of them had much money, but they had little need of it. They were young, and Cal could charm the teeth off a dentist.

They went river rafting on the Valldøla and jet boating on Geiranger Fjord. They delved into the forgotten crevices of marble caves in Rana; not the cave systems usually frequented by tourists, but deeper, darker hollows off the beaten path. On the day of the Sigurdsblot festival, they hiked to the famous stone plateau known as Trolltunga (Norwegian for ‘the troll’s tongue’), where Cal boasted about having once slain a real troll. As she had a habit of doing when he launched into outlandish stories of impossible things, Alice just nodded and smiled.

After Norway, they swept through Sweden, Denmark and Finland, before taking a ferry across the gulf and making their way south through Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland. One year became eighteen months, and Alice might have kept going indefinitely—future be damned—if it weren’t for the little passenger growing in her womb.

It was time to return home and face the music; an apoplectic mother, her university plans in disarray, and the prospect of having to dedicate the next however-many-years of her life to motherhood. As she boarded the plane, so heavily pregnant that they almost wouldn’t let her onboard, Cal promised he’d fly to be with her and their child just as soon as he’d sorted out his visa.

That was the last she saw of him.

Cal’s phone number couldn’t be reached. The letters she sent him went unanswered. The emails—well there were no emails, because this was the late nineties, and Alice hadn’t yet dipped her toes into those newfangled Interwebs everyone was talking about. She didn’t even know his nationality, and only after she was no longer in his presence did it occur to her how strange that was.

Tracking down the old acquaintances they’d met on their travels proved equally fruitless. The people she spoke to on the phone remembered Alice well enough, but when she mentioned Cal, they sounded baffled. In their minds Calbert Bitterbee didn’t exist, and had never existed.

As the years rolled ever onward, Alice’s time with Cal faded into a distant dream, awoken only in brief moments of clarity, when she looked upon the brilliant, inexplicable child they’d made together.

It came back to Saskia in a rush; the story she’d slowly, painfully extracted from her mother over the years, rendered vividly in her mind, and embellished with little details she couldn’t recall ever hearing. Was this an oracle thing, or just her own forgotten memories, dredged up in a time of need? Stories about trolls and caves might have seemed unimportant at the time she heard them, but given her present circumstances, they couldn’t be more relevant. She was pretty sure her mum had never mentioned the brainwashing and forgetfulness though. That sounded suspiciously supernatural.

Saskia had grown up resenting her so-called-father, but at the same time she’d always been a little intrigued by the mystery of him. This man who had captured her mother’s heart and then vanished; who was he really, and what had happened to him? Had he died? Hit his head and suffered from amnesia? Was he a wanted terrorist? Or just a complete donkhole; a conman who had fooled a gullible young woman into believing he cared for her?

Most of the time, in Saskia’s mind, the donkhole theory won. It was the simplest explanation, and therefore the most likely. The world was full of donkholes. Why would her father be any different?

Except now everything had just taken a turn for the weird, and she was beginning to think that maybe things weren’t so simple.

Saskia stared at the portrait of the dwarf who looked like her father, who just moments earlier had appeared inside a painting of her dream. What could it mean?

Although she’d been having variations of that dream for two years before she came here, she’d long suspected it had something to do with her arrival on this world. Had Calbert Bitterbee experienced the same dreams? Were they dreams, or…?

“Did you see that?” she asked Ruhildi, who had come up behind her.

“I don’t ken what you mean,” said Ruhildi, her eyes flicking back and forth between Saskia and the painting.

“The painting, it just changed. Did you see?”

“No…” Ruhildi’s voice was tinged with uncertainty. “Mayhap you just witnessed another of your oracle visions.”

“Maybe,” agreed Saskia.

There was an inscription at the base of the painting that she couldn’t read yet. Just as well she was in a library then, with more than enough reading material to feed her translator.

She hurriedly leafed through one of the books. Come on translator, she urged. Do your thing! Just a few pages in, something changed inside her, and like magic she suddenly understood the symbols on the page, and how they formed words and sentences. Actually, she was pretty sure it was magic.

Returning to the painting, she read the inscription aloud to her friend. “It says: ‘Archurgist Calburn, Master of the Dead Sanctum.’”

Ruhildi’s face held an unreadable expression. “Far as I ken, there were only one Archurgist Calburn, and he were the Calburn: the Arborcaede, the demon king of legend. I ken folk back in Torpend who’d offer their firstborns up to the alvari for the chance to lay eyes on this painting.”

Saskia didn’t know what to make of that. But given that Ruhildi called her a demon, it made sense that other dwarves would consider her father one too. “On Earth, he called himself Calbert. Calbert Bitterbee. Probably lied about that though.”

Her friend’s eyes grew wide. “You kenned him; you kenned the Arborcaede.”

“The what?” Saskia shook her head. “No, not exactly. I never actually met the man in the painting. Well, except in the sense that I came from him, and he was there while I was chilling inside my mum.” Her face grew hot. “Crap, that came out wrong. I mean—ugh, forget I said anything.”

“You…you were his…” said Ruhildi, seeming to put two-and-two together.

“Daughter,” admitted Saskia. “He…abandoned me and my mum before I was born.”

Maybe I should give him the benefit of the doubt on that front, she thought. She hadn’t exactly chosen to come to this world. Perhaps it was the same for her dad. Except when he’d spawned on this world, it had been as a dwarf, not a troll. Now that she thought about it, this seemed the most likely explanation. He wasn’t a bad father, just a victim of circumstance, like her.

Great, now she felt bad for him.

“I guess you’d better tell me more about this demon of legend,” said Saskia. “Something tells me it’s not gonna be a happy story of rainbows and cuddles.”

“Alright,” said Ruhildi. “I’ll share what I ken, but what I ken is more hearsay than history. And the things that were said about Calburn the Arborcaede, they can’t all be true. Among the leaf-ears, there were none more feared and hated than he. For my people, Calburn’s legacy is more complicated. Back in the ’Neath, there are those who curse him, aye. But speak to the common folk, and you’ll find as many who invoke his name with reverence.”

“What about you? Which camp are you in?”

Ruhildi looked at her blankly. “We haven’t made camp, Sashki.”

“I mean, what do you believe? Which side are you on? Revere or curse?”

“Och, I’ll say only that I have no patience for Abellion loyalists, but I don’t presume to ken the whole truth.”

“Okay…I don’t quite follow, but…moving on. What did he do that was so controversial?”

“The core of it is: Calburn sought to overthrow the Arbordeus.”

“The Arbordeus, Abellion…he’s like…some sorta god, right?”

Ruhildi stared at her for a long moment before answering. “Not just a god. The old gods are dead, and only Abellion remains. The very notion of rising up against him were…”

“Idiotic?”

“Overly ambitious,” said Ruhildi. “’Twere not without provocation though. Abellion were steadfast in his disdain for our kind, and his love of the leaf-ears. Despite this, the Ulugmiri Empire—our forefathers—had forged a peace treaty with the alvari of Ciendil. But Abellion coaxed the leaf-ears into breaking the treaty with a cowardly sneak attack against Climber’s Gate, the dwarrow fortress on Ciendil.

“When Archurgist Calburn entered the fray with his legion of the dead, neither side kenned what to make of him. What happened next were not soon forgot. His minions sent the alvari clans squirting back to Elcianor so fast their knees got blisters.”

Saskia blinked. “He was a necrourgist?”

“Aye,” said Ruhildi. “Mayhap the first of our kind.

“Calburn went on to win victory after victory against the leaf-ears. With each great enclave that fell to his legions, he claimed another precious worldseed for the Empire. And so his legend grew.

“’Twere not long afore his influence rivalled that of King Dunmod of Ulugmir, and a feud boiled between them that I shan’t get into. The result of that were that the king lost his head, and the Arborcaede won an Empire.

“His dominion over dwarrow and alvari all but assured, the demon king turned his gaze to the throne of the Arbordeus. Enraged, Abellion set forest and meadow and sea and stone against him. Roads were swallowed and cities smothered, their people buried, only to rise again and serve in Calburn’s dead legions. A battle ensued, the likes of which we can only imagine, for none yet live who witnessed it, save Abellion himself. It brought about what came to be known as the Desecration of Ulugmir.”

“Ulugmir is, what, a branch of the world tree, like Ciendil?”

Ruhildi looked down at the floor. “Aye. She were our homeland; the birthplace of the dwarrows. Ulugmir goes by a different name now: the Deadlands. All that remains is her corpse; a withered, frozen husk, home to nought but shivering echoes.”

Saskia shivered. “So Calburn…died, I take it.”

“Aye,” said Ruhildi. “Along with everyone else on Ulugmir. As you said, ’twere not a happy tale.”

Saskia frowned, unsure what she should be feeling. Should she be grieving for a man she’d never met? Shocked that her father might have triggered an apocalypse? Mostly, she just felt…numb.

“That sounds…awful,” she said slowly. “I mean, the story makes both Abellion and my da…Calburn out to be power-hungry megalomaniacs who between them managed to destroy a big chunk of the world. Are you really okay that I came from…that?” She pointed at the dwarf in the painting.

“’Twere a long time ago,” said Ruhildi, giving a dwarven shrug. “Whatever your pap’s sins may be, they’re not yours to bear. I ken you’re a kind one. Too kind, methinks sometimes.”

“I just…can’t get my head around this,” said Saskia. She was struggling to reconcile the story of her father’s role in this apocalyptic story with the photos she’d seen of a carefree guy hugging her mother. It just didn’t add up. “How long ago did this happen?”

“I don’t rightly ken. A fistful of greatspan, at least.”

Over five hundred years, translated Saskia. A span was nine local years, just shy of an Earth decade, while a greatspan was a little over a century. She shook her head. “Do you really think this guy who died five hundred years before I was born could be my father?”

Ruhildi looked perplexed. “That can’t be. What age are you, Sashki?”

“Twenty three,” said Saskia.

“Twenty three…span,” said Ruhildi uncertainly.

Saskia glared at her. “Seriously? I mean years! Twenty three years!”

“Two span and—great drackens, I had no inkling you were so young! You don’t look a day under eight span.”

“Gee, thanks,” said Saskia. “Where I come from, eighty is considered elderly. Humans rarely live to be a hundred.”

“So young,” repeated Ruhildi, looking at her with sad eyes.

“Yeah well…it is what it is. Why? How old are you?”

“I…lost count,” said Ruhildi. “’Twere hard to measure the passage of time as a slave. I must be well into my seventh span by now.”

Seventy Earth years. Her friend didn’t look more than forty, despite her incredibly harsh life. Dwarves apparently aged much slower than humans.

“As for how it were possible for you to be the daughter of Calburn, I ken not,” admitted Ruhildi. “Mayhap the demon king were not slain, but banished back to your world.”

“That still doesn’t explain the age thing, but yeah, maybe…”

Saskia remembered the story he’d told her mum about slaying a troll. Maybe he had returned to Earth from Arbor Mundi before he met her mother.

The only other possibilities she could think of involved timey-wimey stuff, which, to be fair, she shouldn’t be too quick to rule out. This could be a Narnia-like situation, where time moved at different speeds on the two worlds.

“Anyhow, there’s no use standing around guessing,” said Saskia. “Maybe some of these books could tell us more. If my father was a necrourgist, there’s a chance he might have been here.”

“Aye, that may be so, but we don’t have time to go through them all,” pointed out Ruhildi. “Mayhap you could call upon your mystic sight to hasten the search…”

Saskia raised her eyebrows. She hadn’t thought of that. Maybe she could?

Alright, oracle interface, she thought to herself as her gaze swept the room. Be a dear and highlight any plot-relevant items for me, please.

And just like that, several of the books on a nearby shelf began to glow.

Okay that’s just creepy, she thought.

Taking a deep breath, she went to see just what her interface considered plot-relevant. Skimming through the pages of the first volume, she discovered that certain passages were highlighted in her interface, saving her the trouble of having to read the whole thing to get to the important bits.

Each of the highlighted books were in fact volumes of a single journal penned by one of Calburn’s apprentices, a dwarf necromancer named Poggendoobler.

Ruhildi raised her eyebrows at Saskia’s snicker. “Something amusing, Sashki?” Hearing Saskia read out the name, she frowned. “I’ll have you ken, Poggendoobler is quite the respectable name amongst my people.”

“What, really?”

“Aye,” said Ruhildi. “He were named after the dwarrow demigod, Poggendoobling, son of Thugthipthangot and Bobbliboogdang.”

“Okay, now I know you’re just making this up.”

In the dry, fantiferous tone of an illiterate history professor on acid, Poggendoob—Pog wrote of the Archurgist’s preparations to capture Wengarlen and the seed of life. Ruhildi became very interested when Saskia translated this passage for her. Turned out Wengarlen was the name of the town where she’d been kept as a slave for years.

Pog’s journal offered up some intriguing information about this oddly civilised dungeon, called the Dead Sanctum. Once upon a time, these chambers had been perfectly ordinary dwarven catacombs; the kind whose occupants didn’t normally bother to rise from their coffins to sweep the floor. The ready supply of corpses within the catacombs had proven irresistible to a necromancer like Calburn. He’d set up shop here during their early campaign against the elves, long before his fateful clash with Abellion. It was his forward base, a home away from home, and a laboratory of sorts.

After they conquered the elves—which took less than a year, according to the journal—Pog remained behind as caretaker of the Dead Sanctum, while Calburn went to Ulugmir, and fate unknown (at least to Pog).

In Pog’s last entry, he wrote of leaving the Sanctum to ‘quash a troublesome rebellion.’ She imagined he must have met a sticky end at the hands of the elves, leaving the undead servants to endlessly carry out their last set of programmed directives.

By the time she left the library and stepped out into the corridor, it was already early evening outside. The journey topside would take at least several hours, but there didn’t seem much reason to head back tonight. This place was actually more a comfortable home than her cave, ignoring the creepy undead maids, and the guards who wanted to murder her friend. There were bedrooms, for dog’s sake. They’d brought everything they needed with them, knowing it could be a long journey to the Underneath, and possibly a one-way trip, if indeed there was a passage all the way down from here.

She found a large kitchen just down the corridor, with an actual wood stove. A mummy cook in a tattered vest stood mouldering in the corner. He probably hadn’t had anyone to serve in centuries. Unfortunately there was no fuel for the stove, so they had to settle for a cold meal.

As a precaution, they shared a bedroom that night, with Ruhildi taking the bed (it was far too small for a troll), while Saskia sprawled on the floor next to the door, in case an undead someone decided to pay them a visit in the night.

Before she closed her eyes, Saskia touched the druid’s staff, just to make sure he was still safely far away from here. She found him…entertaining that gorgeous lady friend of his, so she hastily exited the vision, stage outta here.

Fantabulous, she thought to herself, her cheeks flaming. Now I won’t be able to get to sleep for hours.

She did eventually nod off, only to be awoken several times in the night by shuffling sounds outside.

The next day, she took a winding staircase down to the second level of the dungeon. This place was vast according to her minimap, with chambers spread over an area several kilometres wide, and with a couple of tunnels that disappeared off the edge of her map. But only a small portion of the tunnels and rooms looked to have been converted into what Pog had called the Dead Sanctum. The rest were the original catacombs, crawling with who knew what evil—

Well actually, they were weren’t crawling with much at all. There were just a few green markers showing on her map; probably bats. The rest of the catacombs’ occupants were still in their tombs, doing what corpses were supposed to do: mouldering quietly.

This level looked to have been devoted to the actual raising and outfitting of Calburn’s undead minions. There was a large storage chamber filled to the brim with statuesque skeletal guardians. On the far side was a smithy manned by a naked skeleton with blackened bones. Spilling out from the armoury next door was a hoard of pitted steel weapons and armour. If he hadn’t run out of ore and fuel for the forge, the undead smith would’ve dutifully kept going until the entire level was stacked floor to ceiling with this stuff.

She wanted Ruhildi to take a look at these items, but those guardians in the adjacent room would be a problem. It’d take forever to shift them all. Maybe there was another way…

Returning to the room where Ruhildi waited, she said, “I have a plan for getting you past the guards, and you’re gonna love it…”

A few minutes later, Ruhildi’s muffled voice emerged from the pigskin bag slung over Saskia’s back: “I don’t like it.”

“What’s not to like?” she asked the wriggling dwarf. “It’s a very comfy bag.”

“It smells of trow.”

“Exactly. What’s not to like?”

Ruhildi coughed, but didn’t answer. Perhaps because she didn’t want to be dropped on the floor.

Saskia sidled between the statuesque guardians, whistling softly. “Nothing to see here, fellas. Just a bag o’ dwarf, fresh for the ovens!”

The bag thumped her in the ear.

Arriving safely in the armoury, she let Ruhildi out to inspect some of the armour pieces. Her friend must have liked what she saw, because she set aside a plate hauberk and greaves for Saskia to collect later. She couldn’t very well curl up in the bag with them, but once they were out of this place, the extra protection would be a dogsend. Although…

“Won’t those hamper your spellcasting?” asked Saskia.

“Not really,” said Ruhildi. “I don’t need to move about to channel a spell, only concentrate for a time. I concentrate better without a sword in my gut.”

It was a pity none of this stuff had been forged in troll-suitable sizes. Maybe if they had time, Ruhildi could cobble together something for her out of all this metal.

By mid-morning she’d explored a good portion of the second level of the Dead Sanctum, but hadn’t ventured far into the wider catacombs or the tunnels beyond.

Near the centre of the converted section was what could best be described as a control chamber. The walls and floor of this room were covered in patterns of the blue crystalline material Ruhildi had told her was an unknown form of arlium; but here they were far more densely packed than she’d seen anywhere else. Combined, they lit up the room like neon lights.

In one corner jutted a slab of stone, dark and smooth and straight-edged, like the monolith from the movie 2001. The blue markings on the walls and floor all seemed to converge on this thing, although its surface was notably free of them.

“A keystone, methinks,” said Ruhildi when Saskia brought her to see it. “It most likely binds the wards and undead minions.”

“Is it safe to touch?” asked Saskia, approaching the monolith warily.

“For you, mayhap,” said Ruhildi.

The keystone remained dark and inscrutable as her eyes swept over it. She wasn’t going to learn anything just by standing here gawking. Steeling herself, she reached out and touched it.

Nothing happened at first.

Saskia shifted awkwardly. “Hello? Is this thing on?”

She ran her fingers across the surface of the stone slab, and found to her surprise that it wasn’t perfectly flat. Her hand met a small palm-shaped indent on what her eyes told her was a smooth, unbroken surface. Feeling with her other hand, she found an identical indent on the other side.

As her fingers made contact with the second indent, a pale light appeared on her interface, before slowly unfurling into a scroll of parchment. On the phantom scroll was written a single line of Ulugmiran text:

Say your command, mouthlet.

Huh? Saskia blinked at the prompt. She didn’t know how to speak Ulugmiran aloud, so she had to resort to the modern Dwarvish dialect. “You can start by telling me what you mean by ‘mouthlet?’”

Nothing happened, so she said, “What are my available options?”

Still no response. After a few more tries, she gave an exasperated sigh and glanced back at Ruhildi. “Any idea what I’m supposed to do? It’s asking for a command.”

“I’m surprised you can hear anything it says,” said Ruhildi. “Wards and keystones are the stuff of advanced stoneshaping. I can’t make them—not yet. If you’re truly speaking to this keystone, you’re doing it by means beyond my ken.”

“I think it’s sort of hooked into my oracle interface. But kinda badly.” Saskia paused, thinking for a moment, before she said, “Actually, an idea just occurred to me…”

She couldn’t speak Ulugmiran but she should be able write it, having read many pages of the language. What she needed was a keyboard.

Oracle interface, you know what I want, right? she thought. Can you do something about it?

A spectral quill began to form before her eyes. Okay, so it wasn’t a keyboard, but it was the next best thing.

Moving the quill with her mind was surprisingly easy. With it, she wrote on the scroll below the monolith’s message:

Tell the remaining skeletal guardians to stop attacking my dwarrow friend, Ruhildi.

The scroll…uh, scrolled up to reveal the words:

Unable to comply. The dwarrow does not have permission to enter the Dead Sanctum.

Saskia: Then give her permission.

Keystone: Unable to comply. Only a mouthlet of the master can grant guest privileges to indigenous allies.

Saskia: What does that even mean? Didn’t you just call me a mouthlet?

Keystone: You are a mouthlet of unknown affiliation. Your nature affords you guest privileges by default, but only a mouthlet of the master can add new guests.

Saskia puzzled over the latest message. The master was probably her father, Calburn. As for mouthlets, they might be his apprentices, like Pog. Except that would mean it thought she was someone else’s apprentice. And it mentioned her nature…as what? A demon?

Regardless, it seemed like now would be a good time to play the family card.

Saskia: The master is dead. I’m his daughter, his successor. Therefore his privileges pass to me.

Keystone: Analysing. Please wait…

A bright circle appeared in the floor beneath Saskia’s feet, suffusing her with golden light. The air around her seemed to vibrate, and she felt a tingling sensation throughout her body, like a continual static shock; not exactly painful, but disconcerting. She had to fight the urge to step out of the beam.

Then the beam winked out.

Keystone: Analysis complete. Remote sites contacted. Master’s banishment confirmed. Anima equivalency exceeds minimum thresholds required for handover. Welcome to the Dead Sanctum, mouthlet of the new master.

Well that was easy, thought Saskia. Yay for nepotism? But it hadn’t escaped her notice that the keystone considered her a mouthlet, not the master herself.

A wavering shape began to form next to the keystone interface: an outline of what she could only assume was the world tree, Arbor Mundi. On some of the branches were black markers resembling the keystone. One of them had a bright halo around it. Were these the remote sites the keystone mentioned? It seemed highly likely. The highlighted one was probably her current location, the Dead Sanctum.

With a mental flex, she zoomed in on the branch containing that marker, and saw that it was indeed labelled The Dead Sanctum. There was only one other keystone on Ciendil, out in the middle of the sea. It was called The Vortex Roost.

Saskia: Is The Vortex Roost still active?

Keystone: Site dormant. Security has been compromised. Advise extreme caution.

That sounded ominous, but it still might be worth paying a visit if she got the chance. If this were an actual game, exploring all the other sites left behind by her father would probably be a high-level quest with valuable rewards.

But for now, she needed to focus on the matter at hand. After a few more questions to hash out the details, she released the monolith and turned to Ruhildi. “I’ve persuaded the keystone to give you guest privileges. The guardians will no longer attack. You just need to touch the keystone.”

Her friend flashed her a rare smile, and placed her hands against the dark stone. She stood there in silence for a long time, eyes closed in concentration. “Astounding,” she breathed. “My stone sense—I can feel…everything in these halls. Every stone, every pebble inside the Dead Sanctum.”

“What about the undead?”

Ruhildi went still for a long moment before answering. “Aye, them too. All of them now fall under my sway.”

“That’s…really overpowered. Not that I’m complaining or—”

Saskia stopped speaking mid-sentence, swaying. She felt as if an immense weight were bearing down on her, squeezing the air from her lungs.

Time seemed to stretch like a rubber band. She could see Ruhildi’s expression gradually morphing into a frown of puzzlement, as—ever so slowly—the world began to tilt.

In the endless space between one second and the next, she saw it. And it saw her. Something vast and cold and incalculably ancient, regarding her with pale eyes.

Cold stone rushed up to meet her.