Town, seen from above, was alive with the stirrings of small souls. At a distance it looked like a place full of dry leaves scuttling about in a wind, but of course when he swooped lower he could see that these were not leaves but smaller forms. Some of those had wings but most did not. Those that did commonly lacked any great skill in flying, and over time the disused wings would shrink. He saw that they had been making alterations to their houses and to the swathes of grass separating one from the next. He had expected that they would do so, and yet he found it troubling in an indefinable way. He wanted them to learn the trick of shaping the world, just as he had learned to do, but he did not wish for them to acquire so much power that they could break the forms that he considered proper. Beating his wings, hovering above the park in the middle of Town, he saw the faces of the souls—all equipped with mouths now—turn upward to regard him. This he had expected and indeed hoped for, since he wished to show them a useful pattern that a soul ought to shape itself into. By and large he had done this through the intermediation of Ward. He could see that it had been working well, but there was nothing amiss in letting them look upon him directly from time to time.

What he had not expected was that the souls of the Town, upon spying him, used their mouths to call out to one another, uttering his name as well as other words that he could not distinguish so easily. Too, they clumped together in twos, threes, and larger groups, the better to exchange words as they looked up and regarded Egdod hovering in the sky above them. He noticed that when they stood close together, the auras that swathed their heads would sometimes flow together, as creeks joined together to make larger streams. The auras would swirl about and circulate among several souls’ heads at once, as if they had combined into one.

Chapter 29

Chapter 29

MonsterCon 3 was what everyone at the Forthrast Family Foundation called the event, because its official name was too unwieldy. The terminology leaked out over the various mail and messaging systems that they used to coordinate it with the Waterhouse-Shaftoe Family Foundation, with El Shepherd’s network, and other interested parties, obliging Zula to send out a fatwa abolishing its use, scrubbing all Frankenstein imagery, and reminding everyone that it was supposed to be called the Third Annual Conference on Trends in Advanced Neural System Simulation. Or, if that was too much verbiage, ACTANSS 3. They still held it at the same resort in British Columbia where they had held the first one. This meant holding the head count down to fifty, with twenty-five support staff sleeping in RVs, and even tents, scattered around the property.