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Save Point: Gratuitous Tentacles

Somewhere On Exmoor, August, 1983

They lie prone just behind the rim of the slope for a few seconds, then Terrowne dares to raise his head for a swift fraction of a second, just to get a glimpse.

"Holy hell, look at the tentacles," he curses under his breath.

Cleo takes a quick glimpse of her own and sees exactly what he means. Beyond all the dust and bookshelves and such, the far side of the ancient library is one vast space, the front part still lit by rays of light coming in somewhere high above at ground level, but behind that there's a sort of distortion, an extension of focal length that enables the room to recede into impossible depths. From the deepest parts of the shadows, intertwined structures like tentacles exude, starting off large and thick but branching and sub-branching many-fold as they reach forward. Intriguingly, the tentacles themselves seem to be quite transparent and are highly colorful in their own way, multitudinous shades of pale green and pink and yellow like some sort of variegated coral. It is this very transparency that make them appear rooted in the shadows at the depths, and brightly lit where they reach outward toward the light.

Excessive illumination seems to pain them, and they sway around the moving beams of light that must trace across the floor at various times during the day.

"I knew it, I knew it!" mutters Terrowne. "There's a reason why they always say that things have tentacles. You've seen mine, the ones the Dragon can make. They're not just decoration, they're a part of the higher ecosystem. On the other side. When you start to bend reality enough, the lesser vegetation of the other side starts to work its way through and that's it right over there. If you have tentacles of your own, you can bend things!"

Terrowne is starting to sound a little manic and she shushes him, waiting for a while to let the silence reassert itself. He is obviously trying to express Dragon thoughts in conventional words and finding them inadequate.

When he seems to be calm again, she asks him carefully what is going on, but he takes off on a tangent that seems related.

"This story that I've been hearing for a couple of thousand years now. A temple to a quite ancient thing somewhere right in the middle of the English countryside can cause madness by exposure. Sometimes people find it or learn about it. The best source is a certain author you'll have heard of who saw something, because he describes the species correctly. Mimsy borogroves that grow, and gyre and gimbal in the way. And when they are dense enough, they begin to support larger things, like birds and beasts and bandersnatches! I've seen these things in the Dragon's dreams, they are the common wildlife of the other side. He called us a Jabberwock!"

While Terrowne whispers at her with scary intentness, Cleo takes a longer look at the space just beyond the light where the underground chamber devolves into some sort of extra-space. There is a sort of raised area with several steps leading up to it only in the middle, creating two levels for display on either side. After observing for a while, she realises that what she thought were statues to either side of the staircase are werewolves, not of the pure-blooded sort but from the would-be subculture of the Children of Hounds, almost immobile as they hold submissive poses either side of a space that looks almost like it should hold a throne.

But the space is empty. There is no sign of Her.

"This is worse than the thing with Nephren-Ka," she tells Terrowne, trying to hold his attention. "They're out in the fucking daylight! I'm not sure I can fireball this many without your help!"

"You need to look at Her for me," says Terrowne.

"What?"

"She can conceal herself in a way that we cannot see," he explains, sounding more like the Dragon by the second. Self-reference in the third person is a definite giveaway. "She can change reality in the same way that we can, so we cannot trace her event paths or perceive her possible futures. You must look at her and perceive her to reduce her uncertainty until she is only here and now."

"Well, that's helpful," sighs Cleo. It can be exasperating sometimes, being married to a Dragon.

"With the eyes of a cat I can see things that are hidden from men and gods," he encourages her intently, apparently quoting something. "Look for her!"

Cleo boldly sticks her muzzle into harms way again and begins to scan the entire volume of the room, using every enhancement and augmentation she has. The ancient military stuff tries to tag relevant objects with outlines but labels most of them with strings of changeable gibberish. Depth estimates become increasingly skewed as they approach a point somewhere in the center of the tentacles, which, Cleo realizes, must mean that She is in fact in there.

"When you see her, she will know that you are seeing her," Terrowne whispers directly inside her ear with a muzzle gone first-stage Dragon. "And then she will be able to see you. When it happens we must close with her immediately. But it is the looking that is important, not the attacking. We will help you as we can but we cannot see her."

Cleo wraps her claws around a smooth flat object that she distantly perceives must be the ancient skull they disturbed earlier and concentrates, zooming her vision until she can feel the lenses in her eyes start to deform, trying to see through the distortion to what is hidden inside.

She thinks she knows what the Dragon may be trying to mean when she suddenly perceives what she is already looking at. Like any camouflaged thing, what she was looking for was already in her field of vision and always had been, despite the fact that, until she looked, it hadn't.

Amidst the weaving tentacles, in the center and surprisingly near the front, she makes out the outline of a living shape, literally sleeping inside the fronds, hanging upside down from the roof, with the tentacles coiled around and about her arms and legs to conceal and support her. Eyes full of glowing fire flick open and stare immediately directly back at her.

The Dragon snickers loudly. "I like the way you've perceived her," it laughs.

Presumably She would like to be seen as being great and terrifying, but Cleo's take on her, which becomes more binding by the second, is less majestic and more low-grade B-movie. It just seems eminently appropriate that she should look this way.

The front side of the ridge is a shallow slope of scree, and Cleo slides down it carefully, half on her ass, large stones bouncing around her tail, careful to literally keep an eye on their enemy. The Dragon follows, big claws crunching around and grabbing into the scree as it descends.

It is a long way down the aisle between the stacks of ancient books, and Cleo is dreadfully afraid that she might sneeze and accidentally blink her eyes as her whiskers ripple at yellowed paper dander, dust and cobwebs, a hint of decaying parchment leather. The owners or cult or whatever they are that own this place seem to have collected a hell of a lot of books but never seen to have gotten round to actually reading them. The Dragon seems enthralled by the literary overburden and keeps pulling out impossibly rare volumes, having a quick look and then spinning around in a little skipping dance that audibly tears filament cables of spider-silk as it dashes over to look at something even rarer without being left behind.

The Dragon's behaviour seems slightly demented, but Cleo notices that it never quite breaks her line of sight. Her pace is more measured, a steady procession with eyes open that never wavers. She wonders what she's going to do when they hit the Children of Hounds.

As they emerge from between the bookcases, the tentacles ripple into motion, carrying their adversary towards them by passing Her between themselves, one to the other, in a never-ending susurration that does not seem to require her to even move.

It becomes apparent that She has timed her approach to reach them just before they will ascend the several stairs to the empty throne-space, and so Cleo holds and waits there, just out of reach of the Children of Hounds, who though they shift and glare, seem to likewise be waiting for their mistress. As the tentacles become sparser near the front, they begin to withdraw and coil away from Her, steadily revealing more of Her body as they pass her forward, and the full details of Her shape are finally revealed.

"May I call you Alice?" mocks the Dragon. "I would offer you tea but we seem to be all out."