It twists around him and carries him forward. The world falls away, then stars begin to tumble past him like snow. Faster. A blizzard of stars covering the world, raising deep and silent drifts of stellar motes. A heartbeat. A long winter. Centuries snap and pile into one another, like the cars of a runaway train that has left the rails. He sees the Karanines in early summer, the banners flying from the new guardian fortresses. There are armies on the pass, advancing after the spring thaw, bodies released from the lock of winter to move again. The Udaric hordes, clad in leather and bronze, carrying the skulls of cave ursids on their tribal standards, and bearing too their dreams of finding Vaartuk and deliverance. Their chieftain rides at their head, his warhelm crested with the feathers of a sea raptor. In the woods below, the fortress garrisons muster, sounding the call on brass trumpets that loop around their bodies in a circle. The Karanine Guard, forming tight ranks and shield walls in the mouth of the pass, ready to deploy steel blades and precision discipline against the barbarian invaders, and defend their dreams of stable colonisation.

Iron discipline against feral chaos.

Trumpets calling in the woods. Rams horns blaring from the pass.

Redbeaks still trilling in the trees, oblivious, all those years ago.

An old man beside a pool, sketching.

The low summer sun. An eagle flying. A quiver of extimate spaces overlapping.

A room. A hundred thousand rooms. The people in them. Someone crying. A flame-yellow moon. A bonfire. A Selgioni rug. Laughter.

A sea that was not a sea. An immaterial ocean, waves rising higher than all the worlds of ever. Glimpsed behemoths sounding deep beneath the raging surface. Laughter, again. Perpetual laughter. A cackle. Whispers. Words that make. Words that build and un-build. An Old Night, its endless dark filled with insects in their trillions. Chirring words that predate the mouths that spoke them. Words that predate all organic mouths. Words etched on white stone.

An eye that is not an eye. An eye wounded by worms. A wound in space that is not an eye. An influx. An outpouring. A lie. A truth. A father and his eighteen sons. A transgression. A father and his daughter. A dead girl. Another not yet born. Years crumple like paper, overlapped like shuffled cards, out of order.