That was not part of the feast .
That was what fed on it .
The thought held in Kei for the length of a breath — the flat recognition arriving the way operational facts arrived , before assessment , before plan . And in the same breath the question followed it .
What was it .
*[ INSUFFICIENT DATA AT THIS RANGE , ]* Epoch said . *[ THE VDU REQUIRES PROXIMITY TO RUN ARCHIVE CROSS-CHECK . THE ENTITY'S SIGNATURE IS NOT RESOLVING FROM THE FISSURE . ]*
Proximity .
Kei looked at the thing in the forest below .
It had coiled around the derived apparition — twenty meters of dark length or more , the eye in the bloodglow's near-black phase reading it as serpentine , a snake of impossible scale pouring its coils around the volatile darkness it had caught . He held the shape in his vision and could not hold it . The edges would not stay where his eye placed them . The length read as one thing and then another , and the not-resolving was itself a kind of information .
