The world is slowed and muffled. Sunlight flows around her like syrup in water: glassy, swirling. Before her looms the Blue-Grey Beast, a noble mountain on four legs, carved with a labyrinth of lines wherever there is space.
She feels slowed and muffled as well. There is the Beast and the World and the Sun’s light, but there is nothing else. Everything small has gone. Her breath is feverish, fogging up the drifting strands of light, echoing in her head. The Beast lifts a claw, slow as the shifting of continents, and rests its tip against her forehead.
Its voice buzzes against her skin and in her bones before reaching her ears.
“You are something new,” it says. Then it pauses, and she feels a pressure from all sides, holding her absolutely still.
“You have my will behind you in this,” it decides. “Repair what’s mine.”
The Beast vanishes, and cold air rushes into the space it occupied. Elly Sowe gasps as her surroundings snap back into place: she stands in a cramped stone shed, shining Silk runes meticulously embedded in every surface; she faces a single window which allows just enough sunlight to see by. Her skin is damp with sweat, goose-bumps forming. The sound of her breath is short and sharp, there and gone, as such a small sound should be. She can still feel the Beast’s claw against her forehead, immutable, even as she falls to her knees.
There is a mark there, she knows, a mark of her success, of Drom’s favour. She grins.
