It turned out to be four driev more when Orlon sighted land in the vague distance. The TVE was alive with excitement as people celebrated the end of their long trip at sea. Mezalie was alerted via a half dozen frenzied knocks to her door to wake her before it was practically yanked open.

“Mez,” came Vell’s voice, softly. It was Mezalie’s off shift and she’d been trying to get some sleep in an attempt to reorient her schedule before they landed.

“Mez.” Vell said a bit louder as she approached. Mezalie groaned in response, rolling over in her bunk. “As requested I’ve come with news.” Her voice was high and full of excitement as she barely kept it to a sort of whisper. “Land has been sighted.”

Mezalie untangled one of her hands from her blankets and wiggled her fingers along as she gave a sleepy cheer. Despite the sleep haze she really was ecstatic. They’d hit another small storm the nente before and it had been a rather miserable time for her.

“We’re a ways out still but we’re landing soon.” Vell said, reigning in her excitement to hush herself. “I’ll come back down to get you later,” she promised, quietly retreating back out the door and then it was dark and quiet in her room again.

She thought for a moment that she may not be able to fall asleep again. She turned this way and that for a few moments, trying to mash her pillows into the most comfortable arrangement. As quickly as she’d thought it though she felt the comforting weight of sleep pulling her down once again.

The grass was tall, about knee high in most places. Smaller springy grasses covered the ground between larger patches. It was thick and spongy beneath her feet and feeling it she realized she wasn’t wearing any shoes. She looked down only to realize her feet weren’t there, at least, she couldn’t see them. They felt like they were there.

The fog was as thick as ever, just like all the other times she’d found herself in the dream. She could see a short distance ahead of her or around her but nothing further. There were no landmarks, no especially remarkable clumps of grass, or anything to mark her place. She’d tried pulling up clumps of grass to leave a trail telling her where she’d been but it never worked. As soon as she turned around everything was as it had been.

So she walked. There was no point in running when she wasn’t going anywhere at all, let alone in a hurry. It seemed like the smart thing to do would be to just simply stay put but she felt compelled to go.

She was looking for someone.

She couldn’t recall who she was looking for but she could tell they were here somewhere. Lost in this foggy field just like she was. If she could just figure out a system of some kind to find them.

She tried to yell, maybe they could find each other by sound. When she opened her mouth though not even a whisper of a sound came out. She realized with a start that there wasn’t any sound. Her feet made no noise as they trod through the grass. The tallest pieces of grass swayed in a soundless wind. It was suddenly silent in a way that was deafening. A roaring quiet that crashed in her ears and suddenly disoriented her.

She found herself falling but which way she was falling was a mystery. All she could see in any direction was thick white fog. The field was gone and so was any hope of orienting herself. She had nothing but the swoop of her stomach and the feeling of freefall for what felt like an eternity and then suddenly she remembered again.

She was looking for somebody.

She was getting closer, she could feel it. She could feel them, hidden by the fog somewhere around her. She tried and tried to think of a way to find them. Her fall had gradually slowed into a drift. She felt like a feather floating on an unseen current, drifting through the unending ether.

She remembered that she couldn’t see her feet and realized for the first time that she couldn’t see the rest of herself either. She had no form here and she told herself, maybe she wasn’t limited to abilities of one either. She reached out, stretching past herself and further into the unknown around her. She felt as wisplike as the fog around her, twisting and curling herself outward and mingling with the mist.

Maybe this was how she found them, whoever they were she was looking for. She wished she could remember. It felt like it was on the tip of her tongue, just out of reach. She felt like she should know. How could she have forgotten?

She drifted there, aimless in the fog, for some time. Trying desperately to remember someone she didn’t know.

A noise crept into the roaring silence of the empty place. At first it was barely there, she didn’t even notice the soft rise and fall of it. Then it became more and more jarring, blaring louder and louder, shaking her in her dream, until finally she was shaken from the dream all together. She was ripped back into consciousness when the TVE itself shuddered and jolted, throwing her into the wall of her bunk. Her eyes flew open and the sound of the ship's alarm was suddenly overwhelmingly loud in its screaming. The ship shuddered again, throwing her into the wall again.

She righted herself as quickly as she could, realizing that everything was slightly slanted and uneven. Engine one was down but from the feel of things they didn’t seem to be sinking and she remembered they’d been close to landfall. It felt like they’d been downed on some kind of solid ground which was its own kind of relief. The steady rise and fall of the alarm as it wailed continued on as the only background noise she could hear as she righted herself and shoved her feet into her work boots as quickly as she’d ever done. Her heart hammered in her chest and she could feel herself shaking lightly as she hurried.

Their ship was extremely well maintained and she’d been down in engines recently. It didn’t seem right that the engine could have failed.

With the way the ship was tilted it was difficult to get her door open, the power-based mechanics were shot and she was fighting against the weight of the door as she slid it just far enough to get out. Engine four must also be down, she thought to herself. The door clanged loudly behind her as it slid closed on itself. The alarm blared even louder in the hall than it had in her room, the sound grating on her ears and the beginnings of a headache setting in. Outside of her room now she could smell the acrid stench of something burning. The nose of the ship was pointed down so she began making her way up toward the opposite end. Her instinct was to go to the engines but she needed to find out what was going on first, where was everyone and who was already working on it.

She managed to make it to the staircase at the far end of the hall and she still hadn’t heard any indication that others were present. The further she got the more fear trickled icy into her veins. She heard no footsteps above, no echoing shouts from above. Where was everyone? Why wasn’t there any commotion around the fact at least two of their engines were down? As she rounded the top of the flight going up, the door on the landing above her opened sending voices spiraling down to her. She raced up the steps, relief flooding her, questions ready to tumble from her mouth, only to be met by faces she did not recognize.

There were three people standing at the door. One was dressed in a long, heavy looking cloak of green, adorned around the chest with an ornate golden filigree. The other two wore what appeared to be a uniform of some kind. They wore the same long sleeved gray jacket and black pants.

Mezalie saw them at the same time they saw her.

“What’s going on?” She asked at the same time the man in the green robe pointed down to her.

“Get this one too. Make sure there aren’t any others.” It wasn’t even the thick Yoshkish words he spoke but the way he looked at her that made Mezalie’s blood run cold. He looked at her like something inconsequential, something to be simply dealt with.

She took off at a dead run back down the stairs. She did not waste time looking back to see if they were chasing her. She half-ran, half-slid back down the stairway and threw herself into the door, desperately shoving it open again to get out. When she hit the hallway her feet missed just slightly on the uneven flooring and she went sliding down toward the nose of the ship. She could hear someone fighting with the door behind her and she picked herself up from an uncontrolled slide into a deliberate half-tumble run the rest of the way down.

She managed to make it into the other stairwell before her pursuers caught up with her and she was up the stairs before they’d managed to make it into the stairwell. Up and up she went, trying to get out of the belly of the ship, trying to find anyone that she could to make sense of what was happening.

Breath heaving she burst through the door to the lower deck. She was so focussed on her singular mission of ‘up. out. get out.’ that she was blindsided when several pairs of arms reached for her at once. She fought to break any grip someone got on her- kicking and flailing and biting down hard on an arm around her neck and chest. She heard several curses shouted as they tried to take her down. She immediately recognized the Yoshkish curses, telling her they had indeed made it to Arlenasch.

In her panic she didn’t think twice about using her fen, releasing it in a hot burst from her core. She felt it shoot down her hands, fanning out to her fingers, then down her legs and to her toes. Her body came alight with heat and she felt the fire pooling at the surface of her skin. Shouts followed as the places where strangers tried to hold her burned and her tears ran boiling where they streamed down her face. Places she bit down sizzled as they burned. A man’s scream could be heard as the heat increased with her panic.

She hit the deck hard, shoved from behind and at least one person’s body weight on top of her as she screamed and kicked as hard as she could to shake them off. Someone else grabbed her feet, yelping as they did and she felt helpless as someone haphazardly shackled a pair of large cuffs around her ankles. She tried to twist out of their grip but it was no use, she couldn’t get any traction to get away. Her arms were wrenched behind her and another pair of cuffs were fitted over her wrists. These ones were larger and fully encased her hands separate from each other. She could feel the fen being drawn out of her and into the cuffs, both at her hands and feet. They were nolstone, absorbing the fen to keep her from using it herself. They were heavy and the weight burdened her movement as she was hauled up from the deck by at least one person on each side of her. She tried to wriggle her way free from them as well but from somewhere behind her she received a strong blow to the head and everything went dark.

***

Mezalie swam back to consciousness in bits and pieces sometime later. She jerked her head up only to bang it back into something behind her- a thick wooden beam that had been driven deep into the sand beneath the rocky beach. She felt the solid weight of the cuffs that encased her hands pulling down behind her. Her hands had been re-shackled around the beam at some point, and her shoulders were stiff and ached from being forced to sit with them wrenched back as they were. She could still feel the stone leaching away her fen, drawing it out of her and into the stone.

She tried again to lift her head, slower this time, and leaned it back against the solid beam at her back. Her head was throbbing with a tight, pulsing pain that made her feel sick. The first thing she noticed was the smell, it was smoke and burnt hair acrid and tangy in the air. It burned at her nose and filled her lungs forcing her to cough but she could barely get enough air in without gagging. The next thing she noticed was that someone was shouting, several someones in fact.

She blinked her eyes against the pale light of the small moon, Ahraan, as she tried to look around her. Most of what she could see was in dizzying double vision. She noticed several people in those drab gray uniforms moving around nearby. She saw more people in green robes as well, an old woman wearing them passed in front of her. She followed the movement as the woman passed and when she managed to get her head to roll to the side she saw that Klia was there, bound to a beam just as she was but Klia was standing already.

“Klia?” It was unclear if the other girl heard her weak words over the noise and distance between them or simply noticed her moving but she looked over toward Mezalie. She had tear tracks down her face and fresh ones continued to fall as their eyes met. Mez wanted to say something, opened her mouth but all that came out was nonsensical noises around the burnt taste in her lungs and her head hurt so bad it was hard to clarify the jumble of what she’d even meant in the first place. A man in gray seemed to notice that she’d awoken as he stepped between her and Klia. He kicked her hard in the leg.

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“Kivey o lomi ki,” the man commanded in thick Yoskish. Get on your feet, her mind supplied from somewhere, at least that’s what she thought he said. He stood there, over her, waiting for her to comply. When she didn’t immediately respond he kicked her again, “Up. Now.”

She tried her best to gather her legs beneath her despite her position. It was a multiple attempt process to shimmy her way to standing, her arms still bound painfully behind her. Her legs immediately began to tingle as the blood rushed back to them. She shifted her weight from foot to foot momentarily. Her head swam even worse for a moment, her vision tunneling and going dark around the edges, before clearing.

The tide was out, the waterline quite a ways down. She could see the TVE just down the beach. It sat unevenly with its hulking mass perched downward on a sandbar, explaining the tilt. There were several large, dark spots on its side and front hull that as she stared she realized were not spots, they were holes. Someone had blown holes in the side of the TVE. She remembered the smell of smoke in her brief scuffle.

Her breath caught in her throat and she felt her body go numb as her vision focused again. Between her and the TVE, all down the beach, were other beams standing tall. Each of them had what was obviously a body bound to them. The furthest ones she couldn’t see clearly, but closest to her, she could still see the smoke rising from the charred husk that was once a member of her family. She wanted to cry, like Klia, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t feel anything. She swung her head clumsily back toward Klia and saw that there were others past her. Virda. Arden. Drenna.

"Be it the will of the Universe to grace us-” a booming voice cut through both her horror and the noise.

An old, wrinkled, woman stepped away from the crowd. The gathered group of gray and greens quickly silenced themselves. They parted easily for the woman to pass. She wore the heavy green robes Mez had seen on the man in the ship. It was ornately embroidered and she noted for the first time that the gold was on a separate cowl piece. The woman turned to face the crowd and raised her arms skyward, the crowd cheered once then silenced themselves. Other robed men and women stepped forward toward her and the others, each holding an ornately carved staff. The old woman approached Mez first, on the end and stood well over a head shorter than her. Mez tipped her head to look down at her, trying to focus her dizzied glare at her.

“This will all be over soon my dear,” the woman said. She had the thick accent of someone from northern Arlenasch. Mez’s anger suddenly boiled over her numbness as she realized the woman looked perfectly pleased, a small smile on her face. Under different circumstances she’d have thought the heavy laugh lines and upturned lips made the woman look kind. Mezalie said nothing in return, glaring in hopes that maybe the woman would combust from sheer willpower alone. When, disappointingly, nothing of the sort happened, she opened her mouth and spit in the woman’s face instead, letting out a quick snorting laugh when she managed a direct hit despite her head trauma. The crowd around them gasped and several people made to move toward her at once but the old woman held a single hand aloft, stopping them in place. She looked taken aback for only a moment before returning to her pleasant composure. She used the heavy sleeve of her robe to wipe the spit away.

Mez was furious that it hadn’t even burned her.

“You’ll go last,” the old woman said. Despite the smile, her words were cold.

Without another word she turned away and raised her arms skyward again and the entire crowd cheered. The woman turned and motioned to the man standing beside Virda on the end opposite Mez. He raised his staff aloft. The crowd cheered again and Mezalie turned her head to meet eyes with her friend as best she could. She saw the fear there before Virda locked it away and steeled her expression, refusing to look out at the crowd before them. Klia’s tears had returned in full force.

The man took his staff and placed the end of it above Virda’s head on the post and suddenly bright sigils appeared along the wood, slowly lighting from top to bottom. A strange ringing hum emitted from somewhere and it made her head spin and her teeth feel like they were chattering. The glowing marks increased in brightness as they went and Mezalie could barely see the woman against the light anymore. As the sigils reached the bottom of the post Virda screamed and Mez closed her eyes. Another jeer erupted from the crowd. She'd never seen fen like this before. What were they doing to them?

“Stop! Please! Please!” Klia’s voice rang out between sobs. “Stop!” She cried again. As she said it Virda’s post, and Virda, exploded in bright, heatless, flames. Mez desperately wished she couldn’t hear the screams, the sizzling and popping of the false fire as it consumed her friend. She could hardly even hear Klia’s cries over it anymore.

Mezalie looked straight ahead, straight out at the crowd and straight ahead at the old woman smiling pleasantly as her friends and family were murdered. That ugly, wrinkled, smiling face lit something deep in her core, an anger that she had no control over. Her heart was pounding and her vision was beginning to tunnel again but for very different reasons. Her breaths were coming faster. She could feel her fen responding to the anger as Klia and Arden’s screams of pain rang out around her and hoots and hollers were coming from the crowd. Each time she felt the swell of fen bubble up in her chest though, it was quickly wicked away by the Nolstone.

Finally a man stepped forward and blocked her view of the crowd and the old woman. Like all the others, he placed his staff above her head. She felt the moment that the foreign, wrong, fen began to flow in and out of her. The pain was excruciating, like she was being unraveled, like someone was stabbing her over and over, like she was being peeled down to the very last layer and despite the lack of any physical heat, like she was being seared alive. She could no longer hear anything over the roaring sound in her own ears as the fen worked its way through her, meeting her own in an internal struggle that felt like it would overflow from her body, tearing her apart. It was too much for her to contain. She didn’t know if the ringing in her ears was from the fen or her own screams as it all mingled together. Suddenly there was a loud crack all around her and everything went dark.

…

…

…

When Mezalie opened her eyes again the brightness of her surroundings was blinding. She slammed her eyes shut and tried to remember where she was. There was a gentle quiet around her, a soft rushing. She felt a light breeze tickle over her skin. She was lying on her back, wherever she was. It wasn’t her bunk, she had far too much room. She was warm, comfortable, and something smelled vaguely sweet around her. She blinked her eyes open slowly this time, acclimating to the brightness.

She sat up, all around her was tall grass as far as she could see: a field. She had the feeling that she’d been here before but couldn’t quite remember. Out in the distance she could see that a thick, misty fog obscured anything further. The sky above was hazy and overcast, like she existed in a bubble of field and fog.

Everything here was muted, the sounds of grass shifting in the sweet soft wind, the colors of everything around her. Everything seemed dull, dampened by the haze, even her mind felt foggy. She couldn’t remember how she’d gotten here. Where was everyone?

Carefully she pushed herself to her feet. Despite laying in the grass and dirt and moss, she was neither damp nor dirty when she bent to brush herself off. The grass where she’d been laying didn’t even appear disturbed. She turned in a full circle, looking for any indication that told her which way to go but she found none. Every part of the horizon looked like every other; grass and then fog.

So she picked a direction and she walked.

She padded through the grass, the soft ground beneath her feet quieting her steps. She reached a hand out at her side and felt the long grasses against her palm as she passed. They didn't feel like much of anything, like a whisper of a touch, the remembrance of a feeling. She brought her hands up to inspect and discovered she could see them but she could also see through them. She could vaguely see the horizon through the haze of herself.

She reached out again to touch the grass and was pleased to find that if she pulled hard enough on the end, both forms of her hand and the frond blended together in a mist before drifting apart from each other, neither entire corporeal. In the transference there was a sense of peace.

She continued onward, wandering aimlessly forward for an eternity, an unknowable amount of time. As she walked she began to feel lost, as if she'd known where she was going to begin with.

Wasn’t she supposed to be looking for someone? Yes. She couldn’t remember who she was looking for but she’d been walking an awfully long time now so she must be getting close.

She remembered a pathway. A staircase? No, not a way up, a way in. It was a doorway and it existed somewhere beyond the fog. She was beginning to recall, she had been here before.

A crossroad.

She was meeting them at the crossroad and as she thought it a pathway in the fog began to disperse before her. As she approached she saw that beyond the edge of the field were great foggy stepping stones that led the way. The space below was incomprehensible, either there or not there depending on if she was looking directly at it. She carefully placed an unseen foot onto the first step and the impression showed and the footing felt stable. She gingerly picked her way across the steps, compelled to go.

She realized, about halfway across, that she wasn’t sure how to introduce herself. Both because she couldn’t recall who she was meeting and because she wasn’t sure who she was either? She’d had a name, she was sure. In fact, the more she thought about it, maybe she’d had many names. She paused on the last misty step, contemplating. Would it matter if she couldn't remember?

In the end she felt like if it had been important she would have remembered. She picked her way across until unexpectedly she found herself stepping off the last step and onto a foggy plateau. There were no long grasses here, no sweet wind or peaceful gentleness. Here it was just-

Empty.

She turned back the way she’d come and she knew the stones she’d followed here would already be gone. There were no landmarks here to orient herself in any way. A place so vast and devoid of anything that she felt so, so small and lost in the emptiness. She couldn’t remember anything. Who was she? Who was she looking for? How was she supposed to find someone when she didn’t even know where she was?

A swell of emotion rose up through her, a powerful grief suddenly erupting from her in a noise she wasn’t sure was a shout or a sob. Maybe it was both. The sound of it echoed long into the void. She meant to bring her hands up around herself but they’d faded to nothingness long ago like her feet had. She hugged the impression of her arms around herself instead and she crouched down, huddling in on herself as she wept. The sense of loss was enormous despite not being sure what she’d lost.

Her tears felt hot on her face where they tracked down her cheeks. It was more than the barely there feeling of the grass on her palm. They were not wet, just pleasantly warm where they fell. She let the heat comfort her until the tears soothed themselves away. It could have been only for a moment or it could have been for the rest of time. She stayed there, curled in on herself in the void.

Quiet and still, like the space around her, she felt it, the gentle thump-thump of a heartbeat that wasn't her own. She listened, over the roaring, disorienting, silence and she heard something else. It wasn't a whisper, it was softer than that. It felt like a fleeting thought across the back of her mind but it hadn't come from her.

She felt another fen flow through her, overwhelming in its suddenness. She looked around herself and saw nothing. Instead she pressed her hand into the empty space beside her in a desperate attempt to orient herself again. Suddenly her awareness shifted and the direction she felt the fen coming from was forward. She pushed herself up onto shaky not-there legs and scrambled along to follow the feeling.

She followed the feeling in whatever direction it felt like it came from. She followed a path up then down and around in circles but the landscape never changed until suddenly, there, in the distance, was another person. They were faced away from her but they were definitely there, the only other thing that appeared to exist in this limitless space with her.

As she approached she saw that the person who stood there, like her, was barely there. A shimmering transparent afterimage of someone that was. They turned to her as she approached and as she stood face to face with them she felt the strangest feeling that she was looking into a mirror. She recognized herself in the dazzling brightness where a face once was. The other being held out a hand to her and she knew immediately that she would take it.

She heard the crack and smelled what reminded her of a desert after rain. She felt the backlash of fen as it exploded outwards and coursed into her, throwing her back and nearly ripping their hands apart. Quickly she scrambled back to sit upright only to see that the other being hadn’t even budged from their original position, now bathed in a blinding, iridescent light. She moved to take their hand again more firmly and immediately images began to flit past behind her eyelids.

Images of lives she didn’t know but felt sure she’d lived flew by. People she knew nothing about but felt indescribably connected to all passing by. For just split seconds she saw through each of their eyes and the almost-person across from her wore another face too, different but still somehow recognizable. She felt a bond reach out between them, connecting them again and again. The visions flashed and flickered by so quickly that each time she’d managed to grab onto one it was already gone. Each time she found comfort in a bond she felt the backlash of a bond severed. Each passing vision was harder to keep up with than the last and soon she wasn’t sure where they ended and she began.

The sudden tickle of words against the back of her mind brought her to attention. They had no tone, no voice, but she felt the cold chill of urgency trickle through her with them. The feeling of urgency was turning into adrenaline and they needed to go- now. The other being used their joined hands to pull her after them. She tried to drop their hands then but they held tight to her, shaking their head and pulling her along. She followed because she didn’t know what else to do.

For the first time since entering this place Mezalie heard a noise, a real noise. They both heard it because the other came to a stop and they both looked around and then at each other. A chill ran down Mezalie’s spine. The sound came again and she had to wince against it. It was a sound like nothing else she’d ever heard. like ragged screaming or metal against glass; a terrible, agonizing, wailing.

She was almost afraid to but she turned to look over her shoulder, following their gaze. There behind them was a smudge on the otherwise blank backdrop they were in. That inky smudge was dragging itself out of the emptiness on elongated, overly jointed jegs that looked both solid enough to walk on but liquid enough to bend at angles they shouldn’t. Its oozing body had no defined shape at first until a single, large, white, eye peeled open and centered itself at the front of the monster. It had no pupil but Mezalie was positive it was looking right at them. Below the eye the shape began to bubble and stretch and a jagged hole tore open to reveal a mouthful of crooked teeth that matched the rest of the gross body.

A sudden pull tore her attention away from the grizzly monster and she looked back in time to see the other press their free hand into the emptiness and suddenly a door of light yawned open. They quickly bolted through the door, pulling her along behind but she slammed into an invisible wall right at the threshold, her ability to cross through the door stopped at her shoulder. The other immediately turned to see what was wrong, why she’d stopped. They pulled and it appeared that her arm was solid all the way up to the point she was stuck. Looking down, the rest of her still seemed mildly transparent. She couldn’t cross this doorway. They gave another tug and another hideous screech was heard behind her.

She heard the ear splitting scream of the monster again and pulled her hand away finally in order to cover her ears. It was the only noise in the otherwise absolute silence and she wished with all her being that it would stop. She turned to face the monster and saw that it was dragging itself closer, slowly though, like it was being cautious. She took a step backwards, and then another, pressing her back to the doorway she could not cross. She turned to look over her shoulder and the other being was pounding on the doorway from the other side, unable to cross back it seemed. The monster came closer still, its bubbling, impossible mass moving in a way she couldn’t describe. It simply moved.

The closer it got the more she wanted to run away but where would she even go? It moved closer and she stayed in place. The creature was almost upon her and she felt fear icy in her veins. This close she could see the oily slime oozing out between its gnarled teeth. She felt like it should smell, it looked like it should smell foul but like everything else in this vacuum there was nothing. She fell backwards, pressed to the light door as the other beat uselessly against the divide.

The monster loomed over her, inky darkness beginning to drop down onto her skin. There was no pain but she watched as the splotches seeped into her and dark veins webbed across her where they did. She kicked out violently as the monster placed grotesque ‘hands’ on her legs and dragged her forward. She reached out for anything, trying to find purchase to keep the monster from pulling her with it but there was nothing to hold onto. She scrambled and called on her fen, quickly throwing her hands up, and for the first time since being captured she was able to release a blast of light toward the creature. The monster however, was unfazed. It seemed to absorb the energy into its body and continue spreading its oily darkness over her, slowly swallowing her.

She fought and struggled and pushed back at the substance until it had engulfed her up to her chest and she could no longer fight back. The monster seemed to stop then, bringing its large eye close to her face, examining her. It suddenly reared its head back and let out another piercing wail and Mezalie was only thankful that it sounded no worse up close than it had at a distance. It looked back down at her, heaved its body closer and opened its awful mouth, dripping ooze down onto her face. She saw, at the last moment, a bright burst of light explode from behind her, washing over her and the monster, the sound of something immense shattering and a voice came, crystal clear in the silence.

“No!”

It was her own voice, she thought, but it hadn't come from her own mouth. It was the last thing she heard as twisted teeth came down and the monster snapped its great maw closed around her and then there was nothing