[Regulating its breathing]
A lake bed that could breathe. It sounded about as strange as anything could.
Apart from a word like that, it was hard to find anything else that could describe the sight of the entire foundation supporting the lake lifting up.
Its frail body breathed in short, deep gasps, like a live fish tossed ashore, trying to draw in more oxygen by rapidly working its gas-exchange organs, only to find it was useless.
The components in the air that could sustain life were dwindling, diluted by gas rising to the surface inside countless bubbles.
It seemed faint, but its sting was unlike anything else, burning fiercely in the mucous membranes of the nose and mouth and across the meninges. It was a terrible flavor, as though shrill screams had been sealed inside obstructed bronchi and fermented to excess—rotten, suffocating, extreme.
The light painted their bloodless faces a comical, court-jester white, while their lips turned a deep purple.
The mist itself was glowing, allowing the light to bypass obstacles and travel through it from any angle. It rolled over the gunwales, wormed into the hull, and crept into their constricting, trembling pupils.
Along with the smell and the light came thousands upon thousands of voices, roaring or whispering, each in a different tone and language, yet expressing the same meaning as they searched for minds that could understand them.
The water's surface swelled like an abscess, then fell and burst into murky waves taller than their heads, sweeping toward them.
Behind the gray-yellow curtain of water stood towering walls of Prisms, rising one section at a time, their gaps packed with shrieking biomass. The things that had once lived in the buildings on the lake's islands had now been molded into their most efficient forms. With strength that