I forced myself to raise my eyes from the ground and looked where she was looking. I heard Giles gasp as he saw them too. They were all around us. The Invaders, the Many-Angled Ones, the Hungry Gods. Huge and vast, living things big as mountains. They existed in more than just three physical dimensions at once, so my mind interpreted their appearance as a series of overlapping images, always subtly shifting, never quite the same twice. Their aspect strobed in my head, as much an impression as an image. There were circles of them, rank upon rank, impossible numbers, stretching as far away into the distance as I could bear to look. Waiting.

They rose up into the sky, all of them moving slowly but inexorably forward. Towards the gateway, still pulsating and unfolding behind us. Looking up at them gave me vertigo, as though I might suddenly be plucked off my feet and sent hurtling up into the unbearable sky. I couldn’t tell what the living mountains were made of; only that it was vile and awful, like sentient cancers, with implications my mind didn’t dare consider. They had no obvious limbs, or sense organs, but I knew they knew we were there. Small as we were in comparison, they saw us, and knew us, and hated us.

There was so much more to them than my limited human mind could cope with, more than I was capable of comprehending. I knew that. I made myself concentrate on what my eyes were showing me. They were vast and they were ancient and they were monsters. Their nature blazed forth from them, unhidden by any trace of self-deception. They knew what they were, what they had made of themselves, and they gloried in it. They were evil, evil as an almost pure concept, hating everything that wasn’t them. Because the only thing they wouldn’t or couldn’t feed on was each other. They ate life, and not just for sustenance, but for the sheer joy of destroying it. Antigods, concerned only with consuming creation.

“How do we fight . . . that?” I said.

“You don’t,” said Molly.

I looked quickly around at her, disturbed at something in her voice, and saw something else looking back at me through Molly’s eyes. She looked . . . different, her whole face suffused with a new personality. She even held herself differently, as though new things were forming inside her, changing her shape and her balance. Giles swore softly beside me and reached for his sword. I gestured urgently for him to stop, and then gave the new Molly my full attention. I knew what had happened. The Loathly Ones were only ever extensions of the Hungry Gods, and this close to the real thing, the drone inside Molly had awakened and taken control.