Once, when April had been a teenager, she and a classmate had visited a pop-up funfair as part of a fireworks night celebration at a local park. The convoy of amusement lorries had included several redundant hot-dog vendors, a merry-go-round, a sort of octopus-esque thing with arms that raised and lowered and, most excitingly, a slingshot ride.
April's friend, a boy named Nathan who had possessed a sixteen-year-old's typical outsized ratio of enthusiasm to sense, had convinced her to wait the fifteen minutes in line while they watched a procession of their fellow fun-farers scream themselves hoarse as they were thrown 200 feet into the air by the twin bungee cables. By the time it was their turn to clip themselves into the pod, April had almost chewed through her lip, and even Nathan had dampened down a bit.
As repeat riders of those kinds of contraptions would know, it was traditional in certain parts for the operators to play a prank on the ride occupants. Some technical issue would be feigned; the attendant would claim that a bolt had rusted, or that the seatbelt was too loose. While they pantomimed concern and secretively checked that the restraints had indeed been secured, the pod would be loosed at an unannounced moment, sending the terrified victims into the sky, their level of genuine fear proportionate to whether or not they were repeat riders and therefore aware of the ruse.
April and her friend were not repeat riders. The boy had passed out on the upstroke. April, it had turned out, wasn't as susceptible to that kind of thing; she had remained stubbornly awake, eyes bulging out of their sockets as she catapulted into the dark night.
"It really is a pity," she thought to herself now, as the tentacle whiplashed her into the air by the ankle, "that my brain just will not give me that kind of break when I want it."
She wished she would pass out. It would probably make her impending death a whole lot more pleasant.
The thing inside the hill roared. It was a pulsing, staccato bellow that traversed the entire frequency spectrum from base, earth-shattering rumble to the piercing shriek of shattering glass. Amplitude ridges blew across the surface of the wet mud, the vibrations in the air pounding sound patterns into the muck. April's eardrums screamed as she was swept up above it all, the fractal tentacle arm curling out in a ponderous upwards arc, giving her a clear view of the entire hill.
Given however that there were now branching tentacle arms emerging from multiple opposing sides of the hill, it was becoming rapidly clear that it was more accurate to say that the thing—or things?—was the hill. If it was a singular creature, then it would have to be taking up more overall volume than its surrounding strata of muck. That muck itself was starting to look more like a kind of coating or crust that was sloughing off in thick sheets and stringy geologic flows. There was something fibrous matted throughout the wet slop which was going some way towards keeping it bound together, but as the creature moved it inadvertently pulled out long strands, stretching them taut and to breaking point under the writhing weight of its branching arms. As the material poured off, it was able to free more of itself, end-fronds of the splitting tentacle arms whipping through the air.
April saw all of this in a heady blur as it tossed her into the sky, a fuzzy picture of the scene whipping through her vision as her eyes tried to squeeze themselves out of her head from acceleration. The thick limb of the titanic thing was a single snaking trunk near its root, but towards its tip it branched out into a sparse pinnulation that grew exponentially extreme, eventually fanning out into a net of curling fern-like feelers at its furthest extremities. It was these feelers that were currently knotted around her ankles, leaving her effectively lashed to the fastest moving fringe of the whipping tendrils.
The sweeping arc she was being pulled along topped out at around 150 metres, leaving her almost level with the top of the valley's ridge-line as she dangled upside-down. She was held there for a stomach-churning moment, before the thing's arm began sweeping back down, the change in velocity flipping her back upright. Where the clutching fronds were constricting against her bare skin—they had managed to hike up her leggings a little, and April still wasn't wearing any footwear—they bit in hard, stinging, rasping hotly against the surface. Nonetheless, April was grateful that the spindly things retained enough strength to support her weight, as they were all that stood between her and a grisly fall to certain death.
As it was, it wasn't exactly a leisurely descent. She dangled from the tip of the thing's tentacle as it swung her down towards the ground, suspended at an odd angle from the gravitational deficit of its downward acceleration. That came to a swift end as the thing pile-drove her into the residual layer of muck around its base, the soft mush cushioning a fall that nonetheless struck her as a hard, wet slap across her entire body.
As she hit the surface, she felt the thing roaring again, the waves of sound pulsing through the ground, the piled mud, and her body; her teeth chattered as she choked to spit out the face-full of dirt. She barely had time to stick her head up and gasp a ragged breath before the thing was pulling at her again, this time smearing her backwards through the mud itself, pulling her horizontally towards the base of the tentacle.
Her hands reached out instinctively, clawing into the surface and managing to catch hold of some of the fibrous strands. She clung on for dear life, her fingers turning white as she willed the matted stuff in the mud not to break. She was sure that neither it nor her fingers could have stood up against the full might of the massive tentacle arm, but the majority of its branched tips were careening wildly above and around her head, leaving the span that was pulling her only able to leverage the strength of a stout trunk of the rough tentacle-flesh that spanned a foot or so across. That by no means made it a slouch compared to a lone person, but it was enough that April was just barely able to cling on, holding herself in place, arms screaming as her entire body was pulled upon like a stubbornly defective Stretch Armstrong.
Something flashed across the surface of the mud beside her, gliding almost without friction as if it were a hovercraft crossing a swamp, except brandishing more glistening bristles and reaching pseudopods. Kroakli landed in an oblate pose on her back, body formed into a sort of shell-like concave tube with probing spine-tipped feelers lashing out towards the tendrils binding her feet. It cried out in a crazed vibratory keening, a guttural, animal noise that only towards the tail end gradually lapsed into something resembling speech.
"Ea-kreae-ah! Not done with you yet, hapless prey-thing! We must need the both of us to be leaving!"
The sinuous white spines, the sharp bite of which April remembered all too readily piercing her own flesh, met with surprising resistance as it lashed them across the tendrils binding April's feet. Nonetheless, the sharpened points and subtly serrated edges—had they had those before?—bit true, and managed to sever several of the probing vein-like feelers that consisted the branching tentacle's bristling outermost fringe, each one less than a centimetre thick.
This seemed to be enough to loosen the grip of those that were remaining, and April's foot, bare and smeared with dirt across red contact sores in trailing lines, slipped free. The tension in her body abruptly rebounded, and she jerked backwards, falling to the side and half-rolling, half-sliding down a mound of fallen mud to thump down onto a patch of exposed grass at its base. Kroakli detached itself from her as she fell, bounding in a fluid leap to land upright on three legs, upper body only vaguely humanoid as it bared spines from its arms, its chest, its head.
Over the top of them both, April caught sight of the tentacle fronds that had been clutching at her, whirling about through the air in dizzying whip-crack spirals, a small forest canopy composed of twitching, snake like twigs that confluenced back into just this one branch of just this single arm. A few droplets of a black fluid rained down as a loose spattering from where Kroakli had managed to cut at it, the injury surely so small against the scale this leviathan beast that it could scarcely have noticed the damage.
Surely it couldn't have noticed.
Right?
The beast within the mound roared again, and this time the blast of sound struck April head on. A hammer blow of warm, wet air blasted out from a cavity situated directly beneath the metres-wide trunk root of the arm she was lying beneath, carrying with it a damp, unwashed-armpit stink of dead meat, black mold, and decomposing vegetable matter. April clapped her hands over her ears as she was faced by the onslaught of noise, retching and dry-heaving as she writhed on the ground, then shrieked, struggling to climb to her feet as she noticed a meter thick tentacle branch slamming down towards her like it was trying to swat a fly.
It was an offshoot of one of the adjacent root-tentacles, having joined the fray to assist its brethren. The mud around the base of both tentacles had been excavated by their combined movement and the blast of air a moment before, and she could see now that they were in fact conjoined. The thing under the mud hill was one massive beast, its layout something like a many-limbed starfish, arms branching and then branching further still as they spread from the central mass buried beneath the centre of pile.
For a terrible moment she was certain that she wouldn't make it out of the way of the falling tentacle in time. Then, as it approached within fifty paces of her and Kroakli, who—to its credit—had stood its ground, it abruptly jerked to a halt in mid air. The twisting whip-fronds of its feathered ends snapped back as the change in momentum rolled through them, and the creature roared again, this time with a note in the blast that carried through like more of a whine.
Gazing up at the topside of the great arm, near where it met the central core, she could see why; there was a vast gash in the surface of its skin, pulled taut and held open in a triangular gape as the tentacle tried to pull forward, forced to stop lest it gut its own root. It was as if it was pinned to the ground by a giant, invisible blade; stuck through the thick outer hide of the arm to get at raw grey-white innards, spilling waterfalls of black goo. The creature stopped pulling on the point where it was pinned, arm going slack and the gash closing up, but still visible upon closer examination—binding the creature's limb in place and limiting its range of motion.
"Run, April, run now!!!" burbled Kroakli, lurching forward in an unnatural morphing gait before eventually getting two human-esque feet under itself again, sprinting away towards the slope leading up the valley. April followed suit, finally pulling herself shakily to her feet, toes squelching in spattered puddles of the mud-stuff from the hill the creature had been hiding under. A substance it had been secreting, maybe?
Either way, she dodged the larger piles of the stuff as she dived after Kroakli, stumbling every few paces as she was struck by the beast's wailing cries.
They made it two-thirds of the way to the slope before another tentacle slammed down in front of their path. Two metres thick, it formed a solid wall that cut off their escape. Actually, April realised, it's the -same- tentacle! The creature had apparently discovered a way to configure its branching limbs that allowed a segment of the pinned, bisected arm to reach forward without straining the wound. That did mean it was limited in how it could twist the encircling section around, though, and so the whirling outer fronds were having some difficulty curling back in upon the tentacle-wall in order to grasp at them.
Kroakli seemed to take this as sufficient opening to disregard the obstacle entirely, bounding in another astonishing elastic leap that cleared the blocking limb entirely. April drew up short, however, skidding to a halt a few feet from the faintly pulsing tentacle. It was covered with muck and huge, barnacle-like, tumorous encrustations of hard leathery hide that leaked more of the ooze.
"I can't-!" shouted April, head craning up to trace the path of an arc over the top of the thing.
She heard a frustrated clicking in reply, and a moment later Kroakli bounded up on top of the tentacle from behind, securing ropey tendrils of its own to the rugged surface. "Useless-!" it began to yell, before being cut off as the tentacle violently lurched upwards into the air. Kroakli's imitation vocal tract collapsed into a hideous surprised groaning as it was flattened against the beast's hide by the sudden acceleration, then was thrown off into the air above April's head like a flailing spattering of blue paint. It managed to pull itself back together into one semi-solid azure clump before impacting a still-intact slope of the larger mud mound covering the creature, throwing up a faint smatter of debris.
April had started to run forward beneath the rising arm, looking back at the scene behind her. Stumbling, she lost sight of where Kroakli had landed as the tentacle, curling up and then under itself, finally managed to get another grip on her with a thicket of its end-fronds. They closed around her midriff this time, cutting sharply into her skin as she shrieked, feet lifting from the ground before she had a chance to process what was happening. The thing whipped her sharply to one side, the creature flexing its arm back out straight so that it could manoeuvre more easily without pulling at its arm-pinning wound. For April, this manifested in her being pulled along a hair-raising horizontal arc, air whipping about in the slipstream.
She had a momentary but vivid flashback of riding the spinning octopus ride at the funfair she had visited with Nathan. It was like she had found herself caught by a macabre real-world manifestation of that many-armed contraption.
One of the black cracks in reality that littered the surrounding landscape whipped past her, its apparent position twisting wildly as she was pulled through space. For a brief moment she was afraid that the creature was going to fling her directly into it, but it danced out of the way at the last second as she was yanked through the patch of empty air where it had appeared to be just a moment before.
Instead, the creature let its tentacle fully unravel, flicking the tip outwards before letting her loose, arrowing down along a shallow diagonal into the ground. Her feet caught a little on some of its stray fronds as it relinquished her, which arrested her velocity enough that she wasn't immediately smushed into aprilcot jam against the ground.
As it was, it was still a hard fall of a good fifteen feet. She smacked down on her back amid a patch of short grass, head jerking back also and cracking against the surface, her entire body blazing with pain. Stars exploded across her vision like the fireworks of the funfair in her memory, and for a moment she was lost in the hazy concussive blur, all thoughts of her current predicament knocked from her like so many bottles of tomato puree off her prep shelf back at Sporks. She lay there amid a whirlwind of hurt, heart thudding loudly behind her eyes.
The creature roared again.
Still unable to stand, she rolled over onto one side so that she was facing the thing. Its most recent outburst had dislodged an even larger chunk of encasing mud, which tumbled down off of the creature's central core in a slow-motion landslide. This, finally, was enough to expose part of the main body from which the massive arms stemmed. As her eyes focussed blurrily, she distinguished a towering conical trunk, yellow-grey from its coat of muck, the vast tentacles emerging out of a sort of sheath around its lower body.
Just above that, she could make out something that might have been a sort of eye. Three rubbery, blue-black lobes bulged from the thick hide in a triangular formation, bounding a dark, three-pointed cross that might have served as a pupil. If it was an eye, though, the creature was unlikely to be seeing anything any time soon, because there was another huge flesh-rending gash cutting directly across it, the wound gaping open as the beast squirmed, leaking vast quantities of black ichor. Once again, it appeared to be being held apart by an invisible blade, leaving the creature unable to move lest it rip its entire body open in the process.
Another deluge of mud slid down the thing's hide, passing over the top of the sundered eye. As it did, the plume of dirt that fell across the opening of the wound appeared to vanish abruptly, as if it had fallen out of reality.
Huh?
April's concussed brain managed nonetheless to make a connection through the pain-haze. The black obelisk that was the reality crack she had been pulled past earlier appeared, from this location, to plunge into the ground several dozen feet in front of the creature, just to the right of her line of sight. It was about three metres across, similar in width, she judged, to the gash across the creature's eye.
If she had to bet, she would guess that if she were to walk closer to the beast, then the crack she was looking at would appear to move through the air in its characteristically ponderous, rippling manner, its apparent position changing relative to her perspective. If she were to get up close to the beast's eye, would perhaps the crack slowly converge upon the gash in its flesh, until she was directly pressed up against it? The two would then overlap, marking the crack's actual position in real space, where it—she imagined—speared right through the giant creature. It was skewered to the ground by dozens of impossibly vast, impossibly sharp tears in reality itself.
No wonder the thing was fucking pissed.
While April was busy boggling at the creature's eye, a shadow fell across her, and she decided that she should probably still be trying to move before-
The tentacle slapped down across her chest, fronds digging into the ground underneath her body and then wrapping around, binding her in a tight mesh of enclosing feelers that lashed her arms to her sides. She struggled in vain as it lifted her from the ground again, the tentacle curling up, trying to pull her in towards the larger body. A blast of rancid air buffeted her as she drew closer, giving her a foretaste of the atmosphere of whatever infernal maw lay within the pits beneath its many arms. April tried to scream, but her chest was so tightly compressed that she couldn't fully draw breath, and managed only a faint wheeze that was inaudible amid the beast's thundering bellows. She could only wait as it drew her in towards itself, slowly and inexorably reeling her in closer...
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...and faltering, the arm slowing inexplicably, before jerking her to a stuttering halt suspended only halfway to the thing's main body. The limb shook slightly, setting April's brain rattling in her skull again, but the massive creature appeared to be having trouble reeling its arm in further, a weird stiffness seizing hold of the mass of muscle puppeteering it it. April could feel it convulse slightly as it held onto her, disparate tentacle segments jerking out of concert, as if the entire coiling span was being wracked by a seizing fit.
Could it be a result of the piercing wound inflicted by the dark crack further up the shaft of its arm? If so, April thought, this new symptom had chosen a very fortuitous moment to set in. Besides, if it was that, then she couldn't even begin to guess how it could be inflicting the fresh malady that she was now watching erupt across the outer skin of the tentacle that was binding her. Strings of clotted black blood were suddenly pouring out from between the thick callused plates that formed the interlocking surface of the snake-like limb; as she watched, even some of those calluses themselves seemed to have the colour drained from them, the creature's hide turning pale and almost mushy, directly in front of her face and under her nose. She felt wetness bleed through where the surface pressed against her skin.
The creature boomed a shrieking roar of what had to be pain, the macabre process accelerating with astonishing speed. Gashes were starting to tear open across the surface of the limb, disgorging fluid into mid air that spattered across the ground, and, in many cases, across April's terrified face. The black fluid was mixed in with something clear, now—then came spurts of a nasty yellow-orange puss, and finally something faintly blue. The tentacle struggled to keep a hold on her, even while it disintegrated, fresh geysers of of its innards bursting outwards. Its ability to support its own weight faltered, and it jerked towards the ground, carrying April with it. It managed to catch itself just in time, suspending April a few feet above the ground, before the thin fronds and tentacle spurs attached to her body practically melted away, dropping her down into a puddle of mud and disgorged bodily fluids.
The creature howled, and April watched the rest of the tentacle segment dissolve above her, showering her in assorted chunks of its flesh and dark blood. An entire branch of the forest of limbs had spontaneously rotted away, right up to one of the larger forks near to the root, leaving the pained beast waving a bleeding stump.
She watched it wordlessly, then suddenly shrieked, finding her voice as some of the fluids spattered about her started moving of their own accord. They pooled together, gathering into a pale blue clump that sat on the surface of the piled mud, until Kroakli burst upwards out from it, reeling the last of the agglomeration into itself in wake of the motion, before landing in a triumphant pose and letting out an exhalant cry.
"Kyah! A magnificent feeding!!! Next the very gods shall be our prey!!!"
"Jesus fucking Christ!" April shouted at it, staring wide-eyed.
"Him too, if he can be found!!"
It sprinted over to April, seizing her arm by one blue fleshy palp-hand and yanking her down off the heaped pile of muck. April was too stunned to object. Instead, she landed and half-stumbled to her feet, half running, half allowing Kroakli to lead her along.
"You can do that?! You can eat that?!" she yelled above the beast's continued titanic groans, gesturing back at it wildly.
"Despairingly, it could not all be for our consumption... We wished to take the brain, but its own self fought with a viscousness to defy our most brutal molecular armament. Blessed with luck the both of us were, that the shards of this dead world had bit true of its flesh. Those wounds were a cause against which its immunity had been already dashed—hah! Through the window left of that clash, we were able to colonize one limb fully!"
They were halfway to the slope leading out of the valley by this point, covering swift ground. The beast seemed too preoccupied by its freshly pulped tentacle to provide much in the way of coordinated resistance or obstacles, its remaining canopy of limb branches flailing wildly above them.
"So you got lucky?!" April screamed towards Kroakli, who was still pulling her along.
"Pah! 'Lucky'?! We would like to observe your attempt at subverting another's biology with your senseless cells, pitifully form-bound, loosely bone-strung Apri-"
There was a faint splash of white light from off to their left, and Kroakli exploded.
April was left dumbstruck and blinking atop a patch of mud-spattered grass, a few paces from the foot of the slope leading up the valley. The pseudo-arm that Kroakli had had wrapped around her wrist was cut off just below the elbow—the remaining stump twitched, writhed, then dissolved into a sticky blue goo that melted around her fingers.
Before she had a chance to react, something grabbed her from behind, sweeping her up in a tight grip around her stomach and yanking her forwards and off her feet. It wasn't a tentacle this time, however; the limb pressing into her bare midriff was cold, hard and metallic, and its bearer jogged along with a heavy stride, jostling her up and down roughly as it carried her under its arm with the ease of a slung duffle bag.
She craned her neck around, looking up at her new companion. The blank double-domed visor of the armoured man stared back at her.
"Finally," he said, voice hissing sternly out of his ring of collar mounted speakers, next to her ear. "Perhaps by now you have wrought enough havoc upon yourself and others to reconsider this meddling."
His other hand was casually swinging the weapon he had used to shoot Kroakli back and forth as he ran. It was a bulbous thing with an oversized cylinder mounted at the business end, like a cross between an assault rifle and a smoke cannister launcher. He shouldered it while he ran, the suit apparently handling the weight of both it and her with ease.
"Be grateful that this time I came equipped," he said, helmet turning slightly. "Normally we would not attempt to intercede so directly, but this is has gone beyond the realm of standard procedure. A dead world, girl? What were you thinking?"
"I-" April gasped out, but the armoured man shushed her.
"Never mind. We can discuss your conduct later, once we have escaped intact."
He glanced back over his shoulder, the helmed twisting around as far as it could go before the swivel hit its built-in stop. His forward gait didn't slow. The giant creature was still bellowing at an obscene volume behind them, although April couldn't see it from the angle at which she was being carried. The armoured man abruptly swerved, just in time to avoid a truck-sized clump of rock, mud and dirt that slammed into the ground slightly ahead of them. It was like a slow motion meteorite impact, blasting dust and pebbles up and away from the slope in the manner of a mortar strike. The creature was apparently now lobbing projectiles after them. The armoured man kept running despite this, unwaveringly.
"Whatever you did to it has made that thing very angry," he muttered, matter-of-factly.
"What- h- what is it?" gasped April, trying to squirm around to get a better look. The man's gauntleted arm had a vice-like grip around her belly, and didn't leave her much room for movement.
"I have no idea," he said. "As far as I can determine, this projective was never charted."
"I don't-" April clawed out the words through another tight breath, "-I don't know how to leave-"
The man glanced at her. "No matter. I will take you with me, to the Committee."
"I- I don't-"
The man shifted his grip, squeezing her against the side of his armoured torso more tightly. April could see a few letters of the embossed inscription across its chest where they pressed into her cheek.
"Do you really think," he asked, voice tight, "that you are in a position to argue with me about that right now?"
April went silent.
Taking only a slight detour to avoid one of the towering cracks, the man approached the summit of the valleyside with April in tow. The stiff legs of the suit pounded down into the loose skree with mechanical strength, excavating deep compacted footholds that were were able to hold both their weight. With a final leaping bound over the ridge-line, he hit the downhill slope at a run, never letting up his breakneck pace. As it passed below the hill line behind them, the roars of the creature became somewhat muted, but even from this distance the ground shook as it bellowed with an increasingly frantic zeal.
"Will it die?" asked April, when she finally found another breath.
The man was silent for a few moments before speaking. "I'm not sure," he said contemplatively. "It was already injured when you arrived. I think that the... the mud that it was under, was some sort of cocoon to stimulate the healing process. If it survives, it will have to begin much of that work again, I think."
"I hope it hurts," spat April, with venom.
"Do you take joy in that? In hurting living things?"
"I- What?" she panted again between words. "It- it tried to kill me!"
"It should not have been disturbed."
"I didn't know-"
"Then you were a fool for coming here!" There was real anger in his voice now, and although she couldn't see his face, the slight tilt of the helmet somehow radiated scorn.
"It's not- I didn't even mean to! I didn't mean to come here!"
"How can you mean that? It was your travelling."
His pace was slowing, now, decaying into a light jog, and then a brisk walk, before he stopped, decanting April onto the ground. She rolled over, body a canvas of muck and alien secretions, skin striped with raised blisters, joints an aching haze.
She groaned. "I don't even know what's going on."
The man was pulling on something that was attached to the bulky box built into his suit's back. A clutch of small objects detached themselves, and he palmed them with one gauntlet. With the other he reached up to his helmet, and clicked its release. The headpiece popped off, and he held it awkwardly with the arm that was still pressing his weapon against his body.
His monkey, which had apparently been sitting on top of his head again, jumped down, shooting April a scornful glance.
"Navique, ready these."
He handed the little creature the handful of small objects, which looked like a set of blunted grey-metal pegs, loosely matching the colour of his suit. Navique nimbly scampered down him to the ground, and set about deploying the pegs in a rough pattern across a patch of bare soil. The dirt still occasionally trembled from the distant protestations of the creature.
The man dropped the helmet and the gun, then pulled another, larger object from his back, and began to fiddle with it. He glanced over at her.
"How do you travel? Do you use a device? Or are you destabilized?"
Her returning gaze was a mix of bafflement and mild panic. "I don't-" she paused for a moment, gathering her thoughts. "I don't know what this is about, but- but Kroakli said-"
The man cut across her. "Kroakli? What is Kroakli?"
"It- the, the blue- the creature you shot!"
He frowned, like something unpleasant had passed under his nose. "I would not pay its utterances any mind. It's gone, now."
The object he had been fiddling with emitted an electronic bleep, then lit up. Looking closer, April could see that it was some sort of control pad, with a hand-grip jutting out from beneath, and a glowing screen, a few mechanical dials arrayed below it. The man twisted a few of them, lines drawing across his now uncovered brow as he frowned. Some incomprehensible text appeared across the screen, glowing in a hot pink, and then was replaced by a the number five in block numerals, reminiscent of an old style digital display. It bleeped again, and the hot pink "5" turned green. He grunted approvingly.
"We will talk about this later," he said, then glanced back over at Navique. "Are we ready?"
The little monkey had just finished deploying the final peg. The full set of them had been planted into the earth, forming a sparse, six-pointed polygon spread out around them. Navique gave the last peg a final pound with its tiny fist, then scrambled back over to the armoured man, chirping.
"Excellent," he said. He turned back to April. "I am sequestering you under the authority of the Outer-Band Overwatch Committee. You will be held in accordance with due process per the established Committee regulations governing Travelling to or from unauthorized projective layers under agreed Committee jurisdiction-"
April tried to speak, but he raised his voice, continuing to talk over her in a continuous rush. Navique climbed onto his head and looked on, sternly.
"-, as well as with regard to the conventions for the prevention of corruption and fissuring within Reservation and Isolate worlds. You will further be held with reference to the accords regarding control of deterioration within Dead worlds. You will be remanded in custody of the Committee in an appropriate quarantine facility until such time as your case is heard by a judicial panel composed of permanent seat members. I can recommend, but cannot guarantee that further information regarding your case will be provided to you prior to the commencement of your trial."
He paused, giving her a long look.
"I'm sorry for this," he said eventually, pressing buttons on the device in his hand, "but you did have it coming."
With a final button push, a pinkish static rose in the space between the pegs, April's hair standing on end. A faint whine built up, growing in magnitude until a screeching keen blotted out the echoes of the roaring creature, still thrashing within its prison of piercing cracks on the other side of the hill, behind them.
The whine of the pegs reached a fever pitch, and there was a burning flash of the pinkish light, suffusing the volume marked out by the pegs. The air seemed to fill with ozone, pressing in from all sides, and April felt a snapping around her, a crackling warping of space that forced her to cry out.
There was a sharp pop, and then they were gone.
Behind the hill, the leviathan creature continued to scream out across its empty world.