So she ascended the stair again, all the way to the flat top of the stone anvil, and put her back to the Fastness and walked north to the very edge, making sure that El could see her. She could actually feel his gaze upon her when he had a moment to take his eyes away from the Chasmian. She felt almost close enough to look him in the eye and kill him. But he knew her power and would keep his distance. By standing here and merely staying alive, she could keep him at bay. She could keep El from reaching, or even knowing about, the ones behind her with the key. So there she stood, observing the fight and standing sentinel for anything El might throw her way.

He was finding more opportunities to do so. From time to time he would absorb a blow from the Chasmian that would nearly reduce him to formless aura, but he had the power to regenerate before his foe could wind up to deliver another. The Chasmian took somewhat longer to reorganize its form when El had disrupted it. Balancing this was the fact that the Chasmian had an infinite reserve handy of the two things of which it was made: rocks and chaos. At one point a flying boulder laid it out flat on the brink of the gorge, right next to the bridge, so that Prim feared it would slide off and sink into the chaos below; but instead the chaos came to it, and replenished what it had lost, and the boulder that had struck it down became part of its form. Thus the battle raged back and forth, and Prim dared not go back to the other edge of the anvil to see how Edda was getting along. But she did notice a conflagration of Lightning Bears up on the glacier, seemingly headed toward the bridge; and in their midst was a darker form that she took at first for an Autochthon, since it was riding a mount.

But the bears would have annihilated any such. They were not there to fight the rider. They were escorting it. Escorting her.

El seemed aware of this. Prim could very nearly read his mind. He wanted no part of fighting the Chasmian while being trapped between Death and this personage on the galloping mount. He made himself larger, and in a few moments’ time delivered such a barrage upon the Chasmian, from all directions, as to derange it completely. It collapsed to a disordered pile of rocks and chaos, most of which avalanched down into the gorge. Prim sensed it was not dead. It would always come back. But in the time it would take for it to reorganize itself, El could attend to other matters. He glanced toward Sophia for a few moments, then turned his back to her; faced the bridge; and brought it down with a gesture.