Kup rolled with the bundle in his arms, taking the chance to pull out the box and shield the opening motion with his body.
He was not sure whether this meant anything, or whether he was merely covering his ears while stealing a bell. Perhaps every movement he believed hidden had long since been reflected from every angle in those scales.
The instant his fingers touched the arrowhead, the scaled thing seemed to sense something. It took the initiative to break its previously unhurried rhythm of attack and struck at an utterly unexpected moment.
A massive creature that combined the traits of flight and crawling, it possessed none of the solidity befitting its size, nor any posture corresponding to its movements. Its form drifted and flickered.
Its beating wings provided no lift with the coordination of a bird. Instead, they sent its sinuous body lunging straight at him.
It needed no acceleration, no obedience to logic. It simply leaped out from the blank spaces in thought and came along a predetermined trajectory, as though the instant one became aware of its existence, every hypothesis in one's mind automatically became its route map.
It was not consciousness that predicted its attack, but consciousness that created a permitted path for it.
From the side, from behind, its outline shifted without end, assuming discontinuous poses as it moved—like the illustrations of a picture book shuffled apart and rebound, piecing together versions of it from different angles along the same trajectory.
The harder one tried to find a pattern in it, the more its aberrant behavior muddled the mind, creating the illusion that it was sometimes slow and sometimes fast—and then death arrived in an instant.
A thousand mirrored scales unfolded before his eyes. Kup held his breath. He saw himself fleeing in panic,