Aton felt a qualm, suddenly wondering whether there had ever been an interlude with a pretty slave girl, a second love hoping pitifully to combat the first—a love that would have saved him from Chthon, had he been able to accept it. Had she been a genuine person at all? Or only another translation of his imagination? Had he ever really left the side of the minionette?

Theme of the shell! Were you part of the broken song?

Was my dream vain, even then?

Even then...

Nothing dies on Idyllia—except hope.

They were at the top of a hillock representing a mountain. Aton forgot his doubt. Under the massing clouds the view was beautiful, bright with that special color of early dusk. The shell, the song—no use to understand.

“I love you!” he shouted, his voice distant in his own ears. “I love you—”and once again his emotion was honest and strong.

Her hair was red; it was black; it was writhing in pain and she fell, as she had to fall, stricken cruelly. Thunder blasted sky and forest and field and love, and the rain fell, drenching, soiling all of it. And the melody he loved was washing away and soaking its blood into the ground.

He tumbled after, rolling, bumping, down the hillside, shocked with the blow he had dealt unwittingly, grasping at the song and finding only mud and torn weeds, love was forbidden, he had never taken a woman for love, only for morbid purpose, always the song, he had lost it, broken it forever...and the cold water sheeting into his upturned face was drowning him.

The rain stopped, in an hour or an instant, and Aton was in the swamp at the foot of the hill, beside the foul pond that bred the vicious annual larvae and spawned the deadly blight. On the far side lay the body, naked, lovely, but not dead, not dead. From the dark surface of the pool came a green glow, a Chthon-glow, casting back the slimed shadows and betraying the ominous ripple at the rim.

Suppressed memories stirred in him, intimations of horror and terrible slaughter. He had been here before. He had—

The undead body rose, and the hair was neither blonde nor fire but a soggy in-between. The form of it was not divinity but merely female. She came at him, circling the dark pool treading on a narrow ledge.

Aton stood on that ledge too, unable to retreat from the noisome brink. There would be no way to avoid her, except to run around that nightmare track in helpless flight, unable to understand his panic. He did not yield to it; he stood and watched her slow march toward him, her small, heavy steps. He watched her second body march in step behind the first, and the third behind that: many bodies, horrible bodies.