The first harpoon bounced off the trembling mess of mineral and muscle, though not before it dislodged crumbling clumps of crystal viscera. The second stuck fast. The third popped its way through some gritty, corneal mass and was left floating in the water in a cloud of boiling, dusty fat. The fourth and fifth found their targets. You skidded and bumped behind the planet’s soul as it screamed and took off. As it dragged you through the River, the water rocketed up your mind’s sinuses and scoured the backs of your mind’s tonsils, and so your mind vomited gouts of water as it was bumped along in a single indignity behind the proto-Beast. You tugged yourself along on the slippery ropes of your own muscle and collagen, and from the shattered remnants of your javelins you raised construct after construct. You let your javelin clatter alongside one hip and climbed alongside your skeleton crew until you had mounted the ghost entirely, clutching handfuls of false stones that tore the soft flesh of your palms, holding on to carapaceous insect tarsus, holding on to gobs of aggregate and flesh.

Your constructs climbed over themselves, over the pseudo-Beast—it thrashed a few back into the water, but the rest climbed on steadily, untouched by fear—and, panting, you hauled yourself up after them. To your hand you transferred the javelin, ringed around your forearm by your seeping rope of tendon, and in the other you raised your two-handed sword. This might have been cool if it wasn’t faintly ridiculous. The Beast started to roll, an infant animal ghost that knew nothing but to flounder in its predator’s jaws: you drove your sword into its spirit as you had driven your sword into its mantle, as the water closed over you again in a maddening rush of filthy, tainted waves.

You thought: I’ll end it. The skeletons—you had made their legs sharpened stakes, driven them into anything soft and jammed and glued them on to anything hard—were tilling up the damned thing with their fleshless hands. You turfed up boiling rock and flesh with your javelin, trying to scrape away the surface, trying to uncover the brain. It was too young and weak to have made a skull. Gathering up your hate, your fear, and your serenity, you thrust your javelin down the moment you perceived a wrinkle of hemisphere, straight through the lobes, and you made the spike a wheel, and you cleaved in half that which was already dead.