My other foot came to rest on the angled surface, scraping down it as I sought to push the bowed part straight more than I sought to find any balance or extra traction. My right foot remained on the floorboard and my right knee hit my chest painfully as I dropped.

The hard edge that separated the front portion of my boot tread from the heel portion caught on the floorboard, giving me control and a semblance of awareness over the position of the piece of wood.

Maybe steadying it that tiny fraction I needed to keep it from bowing further. When I kicked off, I used one leg to launch my full body weight, and the board didn’t spring or fall away from me. My belly hit broken floorboards, and my legs and hips dangled. The buckler and armguard were more hindrance than help as I fought to get a grip.

A hand smashed, palm flat, into the ground about ten feet away from me, floorboards crowning up around the impact site, and I lost an inch of ground. The hand was added traction for whatever heavy lifting it was doing elsewhere.

I wobbled left and right, trying not to make sound or alert it to my presence, gaining quarter inches of progress as I wormed my way forward. I scraped my thighs bloody in the process of getting them over the shattered row of floorboards.

I crawled forward, hands and knees, then shifted to a kneeling position. I was almost directly beneath it.

I looked up, and I saw what I could imagine another planet might look like, if it were separated from our world by only a few hundred miles. A tangle of reaching limbs, recesses, never repeating, not a funhouse mirror or kaleidoscope, but wholly unique when I looked at any portion. Its dimensions distorted the dark portion of the room in retrospect, making it seem like the distance to the gate was miles, and those miles were punctuated by hundreds of arms that were planted on ground that had ceased to be floorboards and was now a plain of what looked like hard, packed salt, granular against my scraped knees and palms.

I felt like my body was nonexistent between my ribcage and my knees, after having my stomach drop so much and so intensely across those frantic minutes. Standing was an exercise in convincing myself not to flop over like Torso had.

Blitz it, I thought. It’s a tinker, supposedly. Let’s hit it before it can hit us.

Moving forward was disorienting. Normal rules for perceiving this thing didn’t seem to apply, as things moved at the wrong speeds in my peripheral vision when I moved past them.