His pupils suddenly constricted. A sense of danger pierced his mind like cold, glaring light, chill streaming down his spine and racing through his torso and limbs.
His body reacted swiftly, instinctively defensive—muscles tensing, neck jerking back—before he realized the disturbance existed within himself. There was no escaping it by physical distance.
His Spiritual Entity abruptly drew taut—he found it difficult to describe this innate stress response. Countless tendons seemed to clench in a contest of strength deep within his consciousness; his scattered senses gathered, and invisible limbs folded back in.
What had once been soft and floating curled tightly in upon itself, hardening into something dull and dense.
That disturbance struggled through its final stretch, like water splashed across a beach—dwindling and seeping away in an instant, completely smoothed out, halted before it reached the hypothalamus.
Sweat mingled with rain striking his face and streamed down in rivulets. It had been far too long since he had experienced anything like this—not merely a threat to his life, but a fear from some higher plane.
It could not be understood, could not be resisted. Even the active Lake Bed beneath Dunling could be explained as an extraordinarily profound biological miracle; but what sort of thing belonged above the clouds?
It could never be a creature of flesh and blood. No known—or imagined—material could allow it to exist rationally.
He shut his dry eyelids, savoring for a moment the darkness of burying his head in the sand, then forced his eyes open and looked into the heart of the rain clouds.
A flash of lightning illuminated an undulating, winding arc. Its immense size created the illusion of sluggish movement; only by comparing it with the reef-like mountain peaks amid the sea of clouds and mist could one see that even the