There lies the sea, many-hued, sparkling, its surface shifting as if roiled by the movements of titanic creatures far below, or perhaps in response to the tug of the swollen amber moon that rests heavily upon the sky. At the shore mighty waves rise up like bright curving crystalline claws, and fall back in utter silence, flailing the shining beaches weightlessly, as though they are not waves but merely the ghosts of waves.

And farther out, beyond all turbulence, a dark ponderous shape looms in the water.

It is a sea dragon; it is the dragon called Lord Kinniken's dragon, that is said to be the largest of all its kind, the king of the sea dragons, which no hunter's harpoon has ever touched. From its great humped bony-ridged back there streams an irresistible radiance, a mysterious shimmering amethystine glow that fills the sky and stains the water a deep violet. And there is the sound of bells, huge and deep, ringing out a steady solemn peal, a dark clangor that threatens to split the world in two at the core.

The dragon swims inexorably shoreward, and its huge mouth gapes like the mouth of a cavern.

— My hour at last has come, says the king of dragons, and you are mine.

The pilgrims, caught, drawn, mesmerized by the rich pulsating light that streams from the dragon, float onward toward the rim of the sea, toward that gaping mouth.

— Yes. Yes. Come to me. I am the water-king Maazmoorn, and you are mine!

Now the dragon king has reached the shallows, and the waves part for him, and he moves with ease onto the beach. The pealing of the bells grows louder still: insistently that terrible sound conquers the atmosphere and presses down upon it, so that with each new tolling the air grows thicker, slower, warmer.

The dragon-king has unfurled the pair of colossal winglike fins that sprout from thick fleshy bases behind his head, and the wings thrust him onward over the wet sand. As he pulls his ponderous form to land, the first pilgrims reach him and without hesitation float on into the titanic maw and disappear; and behind them come others, an unending procession of willing sacrifices, racing forward to meet the dragon-king as he lurches landward to take them in.

And they enter the great mouth, and are engulfed into it, and Valentine is among them, and he goes down deep into the pit of the dragon's stomach. He enters a vaulted chamber of infinite size, and finds it already occupied by the legion of the swallowed, millions, billions—humans and Skandars and Vroons and Hjorts and Liimen and Su-Suheris and Ghayrogs, all the many peoples of Majipoor, impartially caught up in the gullet of the dragon-king.

And still Maazmoorn goes forward, deeper upon the land, and still the dragon-king feeds. He swallows all the world, gulping and gulping and still more ravenously gulping, devouring cities and mountains, the continents and the seas, taking within himself the totality of Majipoor, until at last he has taken it all, and lies coiled around the planet like a swollen serpent that has eaten some enormous globular creature.