And Krobis was there, too, and Terral—all the others. Sometimes they mocked; sometimes they helped him.
Not that it mattered. For now, all at once, he could get away from his own body, floating cloud-like in space beneath three great green suns.
The monsters came, then.
The first was in the image of the Helgae—lumpish, mottled, but with a yawning orifice that he knew somehow was meant to be a mouth. Twice it tried to swallow him as he floated, then faded away again when he rolled away beyond its reach.
The second took the appearance of his own father. Its face pressed close, all clipped mustache and burning eyes and shiny skin.
He shrank before it.
But the face kept following him, pressing closer, and the feeling grew within him that if the tight grey lips should ever open, he would surely die.
So he surged away in utter terror ... fled through the green-tinged sky-sea around him.
But his muscles were all at once like water, his movements as inadequate and slow as only the responses in a dream can be.