Book One – Chapter 17

The silence that followed was not quiet. It was a silence stretched taut, like ice grown too thinly over something vast in the current underneath. It was listened.

And within this silence, another voice emerged.

Yu was already straining, trying to track the strange rhythm of speech between the shaman and the krynn, and the way her body gave shape to what her mouth did not say. But this — this was deeper. It slid beneath the level of sound, threading through the gaps in their words like a pulse too slow to hear. It surfaced amidst those words about hunger, about feeding. At first, he recognised only more of this hunger. Just a pull, drawing him towards the first subtle crack within the ice, from where it beckoned. And as Yu looked and listened for it, he felt himself pulled further in.

Not from the krynn. Not from the shaman either, though from her too. Something not quite hers, yet around and bound to her. Something that spoke through her, but was not her.

It was The One Who Listenes.

At first, there was no form, no sound. Only hunger.

This hunger moved in waves beneath the surface of what could be heard, below where speech thinned into thought and thought into sense. It passed through that translucent veil, the one most minds never notice existed, lest dare to traverse, and entered into the space beneath, where nothing should ever reach. There, where consciousness fractured and stillness began, the hunger hunted shape.

And in its wake, the shape of hunger began to cohere, forming meaning out of those few fragments of consciousness that had transcended the veil of absolute stillness to seek it out. This shape of meaning did not exist in Teh, nor in the guttural tongues of beastkin. It predated even the ancient cadence of those arcane words that comprised all wizardry. It was meaning not voiced through flesh or throat, but born from a tether too deep to name — a communion between the shaman and whatever, or whoever, called to her and through her from within the mountain. A depth too vast, or perhaps too hollow. Too displaced to be found within a world rendered reality through physical sensations.

And still, Yu heard the hunger. For him, within him, it became language. Not through translation, but through intrusion; intention overriding interpretation from the inside.