Damsel slashed at the hands that were resting on the ground, aiming for wires. More and more of the hands that appeared around her didn’t have any, with the living metal coating protecting the joints. She looked like a fencer, favoring one arm.

Focus, I thought.

Same thing I’d been doing. And it had a similar effect. This thing was ungainly, lopsided, ill-fit to the space it occupied. When a hand came down and incredible amounts of weight came to rest on that hand, it suggested a needed support. Weight-bearing.

With a metal-on-metal scream, the hands around Damsel lifted up. The thing had stopped for a moment, repositioning to put its hands out of the way of us, hands planted on the far end of the room, and against the wall on our end.

And I saw Damsel cradle her arm against her chest, claws curled in to almost touch her elbow. Four claws. Her thumb was gone, along with a whole strip of her forearm, with strings of blood, strips of muscle, or tendons dangling from the wound.

She saw me looking and pulled her arm away from her chest, leaving a slick mark diagonal across it. She let her arm hang at her side, finger-claws almost touching the ground. She raised her chin and looked up at the monster.

Choose, I remembered. That had been our Ashley standing there beside her in the dream.

You don’t have to hide that you’re hurt, Damsel.

I knew Ashley, and I had a good sense of how she thought and processed things. Seeing the dream, I knew what was on her mind. She thought, given the chance, we’d get rid of her and get Swansong back.

I wasn’t so sure we would, but it didn’t matter, because she was convinced. I could tell.

The way the thing was getting further away from us de-multiplied the number of arms around us. With more arms pulling up and finding positions elsewhere, the room was distorting again. I could see the process of how the room distorted in reverse this time, see the distant distortion as Tatttletale’s distant area bloated and smeared around.

Put two arms fifteen feet apart, and the space increased to twenty feet, with everything around accommodating. Put two arms ten feet apart, and it increased to twelve or thirteen feet. More arms, more distortion.

In the distance, it placed limbs to expand and stretch out my room. When it tore up and removed panes of glass and those solar panels that were black except where they caught direct light and reflected gold, those things remained expanded, distorted in dimensions. Arms hauled them up to the core, feeding them into that quicksilver flower that it had teched up.