Dark Peak — The Hellsborough Chronicles

As if reading my thoughts, Van posits his own analysis: You'll never get crust in the off-world. Can't happen. You ingest a living being whose only purpose is to get itself and you out of its jelly and take you to places that only exist in the nether. Crust transverses dimensions. Time is a useless construct of the off-world. The murk is quantum. You see forwards in time, you see backwards, you see what has happened, and what will happen, maybe what will never happen. How can you ever know?

That was about the last coherent sentence Van uttered tonight. He howled. I say howled. It was not a sound I have ever heard a human produce before, but howl is the closest verb I can think of.

I fly, slurred Van. I am flutterby. I am mentiloth of xin: death winger; venomtooth of hail and mist; sublime mystic stinger of legends past. Raise your chalice, drink the blood of dunlockslyn -- the great curator, the bringer of life and the harbinger of death. I taste my mother's milk, I feel the space, I feel the reality, the air, the vibrations, the rotation of the Earth, my every memory. Oh Dunlockslyn! I am ready for you -- I am primitive again! I walk your muddy banks and sail your brackish waters to the Ripperthroats, to the end of the infinite, to the finality that I deserve after all this time and all this service, hail You -- You, the most noble creature in all The Dark Peak.

And now I have even less idea what he is going on about, but no matter. The man is an iconoclast. A true lone ripperthroat in this strange and barely comprehensible world.

Pandora gets up from her seat, nodding at the xaexs and crosslander, who also start to rise. They have paid no attention to Van, but he howls again. The din of the bar and the heady infecting atmosphere say closure is close, and having had quite enough excitement for one evening, we head for the outside.