In a curling upsurge of industrial dust, the slake-moth landed. It folded its wings.

It crouched, its back curved and tight, a pose of simian pugnacity. It held its cruel arms—flawed, but still vicious and powerful—with the killing poise of a hunter. It swept its long, thin head slowly from side to side, its eyesocket antennae fumbling in the air.

All around it, constructs shifted minutely. The slake-moth ignored them all. Its brutal, coarse mouth opened and emitted that salacious tongue, flickered it like a huge ribbon across the gathering.

Derkhan moaned and the moth shuddered.

Isaac tried to yell to her to be quiet, not to let it feel her, but he could not speak.

The waves of Isaac’s mind oscillated like a heartbeat, rocking the psychosphere of the dump. The moth could taste it, knew it for the same mind-liquor it had sought before. The other little titbits it could sense were nothing beside it, little morsels by a feast.

The slake-moth quivered with anticipation, and turned its back on Yagharek and Derkhan. It faced Isaac. It stood slowly on four of its limbs, opened its mouth with a tiny, childish hiss, and spread its mesmeric wings.

For a moment, Isaac tried to close his eyes. A little adrenalized part of his brain threw up strategies for escape.

But he was so tired, so befuddled, so miserable and in so much pain, he left it too late. Blearily, unclearly at first, he saw the slake-moth’s wings.

The rippling tide of colours unfolded like anemones, a gentle, uncanny unfurling of enthralling shades. On both sides of the moth’s body, the perfectly mirrored midnight tinctures slipped like thieves down Isaac’s optic nerve and smeared themselves across his mind.

Isaac saw the slake-moth stalk slowly towards him across the wasteground, saw the perfectly symmetrical, curling wings flutter gently and bathe him in their narcotic display.

And then his mind slipped like a faltering flywheel, and he knew nothing except a slew of dreams. A froth of memories and impressions and regrets effervesced up from within him.

This was not like the dreamshit. There was no core of him to watch and cling to sentience. These were not invading dreams. They were his own and there was no he to watch them boil, he was the wash of images itself, he was the recall and the symbol. Isaac was the memory of parent-love, the deep sex fantasies and memories, the bizarre neurotic inventions, the monsters, the adventures, the slips in logic the aggrandizing self-memory the mutating mass of the undermind triumphant over ratiocination and cognition and the reflection that spawned it the terrible and awesome interlocking charges of subconsciousness the dreaming

the dreaming

it

it stopped

stopped suddenly and Isaac bellowed at the sudden breathtaking tug of reality.