The tide took its first step back into the light, and I lifted hands with nothing left in them, and I got ready to die on my feet, because at least that was a choice.
Then the floor moved.
The whole black shelf of stone under ten thousand crawling bodies tilted a single degree, the way a ship's deck tilts when something vast rolls over beneath the hull, and every Lost Mouth in the dark went still at once.
They'd stopped reading me. For the first time all night, every last one of them had turned its bent head the same way, toward the deep dark at the far end of the Precipice, and they were afraid.
'…That's new,' I thought. 'I don't love that.'
