Songeen poised, watching. Her body-outlines swirled and altered in swift mutations before his eyes. She was not woman now. Not even human. She danced and flickered and gibbered at him. She was jeweled movement. Change. She was as crystalline as the forest, as molten emerald as the sky. Points of fire inside her caught and flared and burned inside his eyes. She was not Songeen!
Newlin screamed. He looked down at his hands. He screamed again, louder. His hands were transparent as glass, and as fluid as water. Outlines wavered, changed.
"Try not to change too much," Songeen pleaded. But her voice joined the clattering crystalline tumult which raged about him. He was cracking. He could feel the seams in his mind giving way.
Like a great, floundering beast, he charged toward her. Forms of brittle crystal shattered at his touch. Shattered into sound and pain. The forest-forms changed color, echoing his violence. New vortices of movement converged upon him. Perceptions expanded and radiance showered about him, through him.
The hovering, dancing crystal notes were now visible. Beads of light, dripping from a sky of light. They were sound a color, bright, bursting bubbles of sound. Their rhythmic tempos increased, murmur swelled into insistent roaring and the jangling of insane dissonance. Vitreous grotesques shimmered like a forest of aspens quivering in wind and sunlight. Glassy fragments of splintered sound poured in floods from sky and ground. Trampled grass gave way under his feet in brittle crunching, and the brush shivered at his touch, dissolving into chill slivers of slashing sound.
Blood was dripping. The forest changed color, as if crimson stain spread through it. Hellish glare was a roaring torrent of musical color. Red stains spread swiftly, dying the crystal columns, the glassy sward, seeping into the reeling brain.
There was blood. The taste of it in his mouth, the hot, salt smell, the sound of its dripping. He swam in seas of ruby light, crashing and plunging wildly, sinking into its crimson depths. Red light thickened around him, deepened, smothering.
The darkness was red, fire-shot, roaring....
Then pain and timeless darkness.
Newlin awakened slowly, to ugly tension in his mind. Shadows like beating wings disturbed his memory.