It did not stand where the shaman stood. It was where she stood. Not beside her, not looming behind, not instead of her — but inside her. It wore her.
The beast was too vast to fit her body, yet it wound itself through her silhouette with unbearable elegance. Its immensity did not break her form, it bent through and inhabited it. By silence. By permanence. Its stillness mimicked her shape.
Yet for that brief fraction of vision, caught in the fault-line between blink and breath, Yu recognised the distorted illusion. He truly saw it. Too tall, too wide, too old, bending right over the krynn.
And then he blinked again, and it was gone.
Only the shaman remained. Leaning back. Measured.
Just the shaman.
No beast.
No monster.
Her voice too, returned to its surface calm. “You are marked,” she said to the krynn, in Teh. “But not by a witch. This reading is not for the soul. It is for what travels in the skin. You may enter. For now. Provided the truth you have offered remains unbroken.”
And then, gently, with something almost like reverence: “Should you stray, your own bond binds you beyond these walls.”
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