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Motion. Electric pulse in neural pathways; flesh begets flesh, tissues slide welcome to the path of energy. Phosphorescence. Awakening. A stirring in the pastel bowels of the greater one. The lessers became aware; approach. Arrival. A world of blue and green beyond the opening. A speck of colour in the black. Colour to be tasted; sensations to be smelled. The greater drew closer to the white expanse; the lessers stirred, rolled forth in their slimy majesty. They prepared for the drop.
***
Tobias stirred into wakefulness, as the harsh sound of Rory's barking hammered at his sleep.
"Ye wretched hound," he muttered, pulling himself from the musty mattress, "I'll have yer guts fer garters if'n nothing's wrong."
But something was wrong. The moment Tobias' gnarled feet hit the ground and his eyes creaked open, the old furrier knew there was something terribly wrong.
It must be near dawn.
But morning light was not, normally, blue.
Squinting, Tobias reached for the old axe that lay by his bed, hobbling toward the door with a sense of palpable - something. Not dread, not horror, but a sense of impending destiny.
***
Structure. Crystalline miniaturisation. Formless inegration. Detail interlocking. Dust pebbles stone. Flakes snow white banks. Sap bark twig branch limb tree. Tree snow earth sky. Winter air. Cold. The lessers had no name for what they found. They had no language capable of speaking what they felt. If their emotion could be likened at all to our own, one might imagine they felt at this moment of profound discovery a sense of awed rapture.
***
Tobias wished he could scream, but his voice froze and thickened in his throat. Through the trees he could see something huge, hovering above the ground, blocked by the trunks; the impression was of some sort of gigantic jellyfish, like the ones his father had pulled from the sea when they lived in a small fishing village in his youth; but the skin was pale blue and only half-translucent, covered with some sort of patterned, pebbled texture and elegant streaks of darker azure. It was vaguely ovaloid, but he could see it was opening up, its entire body glowing as though its blood were shedding light through its flesh; splitting into three great fan-shaped portions, and from within, from within the folds of wavering mushroom gills, smaller somethings were dropping, descending, unfurling in perfect unison to splay their strange and boneless limbs, the never-ceasing movement of their humming wing-flaps.
Tobias dropped the axe. He stumbled back through the door; he curled upon the floor in a daze, from which he stirred only for a moment to kick the door shut, hard, and press his back to it, lest those things come in ....
In his stunned and abject stupor, in his distraction absolute, as his mind reeled with shock and tried to wrap its meagre experience around what it had just been fed, Tobias didn't even hear the furious barking of his mange-ridden old dog, calling them closer...
