The old feeling of change, of unutterable newness, of an unguessed sense opening within him like nothing man ever knew before.
Three times he had known this feeling since he stepped into the winged world. Three times he had crushed it down, fearing and hating it for its threat of making him alien again, alien to the winged people he had hoped would be his own. But this time he did not fight. This time, in the violent, straining effort to break free, he broke instead some barrier which had until now held back the new thing, the something which had burgeoned relentlessly within him ever since he came within the Mountain’s realm.
The glass walls that held him like a prisoner in ice grew dim and vanished. His companions pilloried in glass beside him wavered into darkness. He no longer felt the warmth of Byrna frozen in glass in his arms. Everything was dark—even the slow—coiling ribbons that looped leisurely toward him through solid substance.
And then out of that darkness came light. All about him came light. And it took a long moment for him to discover he was not seeing that light with eyes. He was seeing it—incredibly, impossibly—with his whole body. He saw everything around him in one all-encompassing range.
“This is the way the Mountain sees,” he knew with sudden certainty. How he knew it was not clear; it was a knowledge that came with the new vision. He and the Mountain, they shared a common faculty.
Motion far away caught his fathomless attention and he was looking out through the clouded side of the Mountain and seeing, as if he stood before them, the flight of the oncoming winged men who had followed the fugitives from the eyrie. They were nearly here now, approaching the monstrous cliff as blindly as if they meant to dash themselves to death against it.
With the same all-embracing sight, Kern was aware of the people frozen around him into the glass, and of the looping coils that flowed toward them, and of Bruce Hallam, rigid as an image of stone, moving with the moving ribbons.
But they looked very different now. The people.
He knew their faces, the familiar outlines of their bodies, but he could see through the bodies with his new vision. And the appalling thing he saw was not the structure of bone and muscle and nerve which a part of his mind expected there. These things were only pale shadows upon the—the other.
The people were rings of flat, luminous color, disc upon disc of it, superimposed, overlapping, no two people with the same patterns or the same colors. And he knew that the muscular structure humans are aware of, the skeleton, the nerves, are only a part of what comprises them. Only a part—and not the part important to the Mountain. The Mountain ruled by other means.
Every flying man approaching outside the cliff had one thing in common with his fellows. Each was made up of ring after ring of colors, brilliant arcs and half-moons lying one upon another and in continual delicate shifting motion. But in each, and moving slowly over the rings, a circle of luminous darkness swung. Darkness like the eyes which swam up to the surface of the coiling ribbons that embraced Bruce Hallam. An eye—the eye of the Mountain.
That was the thing the Mountain used in them to transmit its commands, then. The point of contact in each man that made him a slave when the orders came.
There was no such eye in any of the people imprisoned around Kern. He saw his own body with this new vision, rings and discs of color like the rest, and with no dark, circling spot that meant the Mountain owned him.
The Mountain is a creature of glass, he told himself clearly. Its body is this opalescent stuff which is solid or gas as the Mountain wills. It can make tunnels and caverns like open mouths through it and close them again. And its brain, its motivating force, is the ribbon of fire, endless, revolving upon itself in the center. It has many strange senses. One of them I share now.
He thought: When we came here, we somehow brought on a cyclone of violent forces drawn from the Mountain itself. Because Bruce Hallam had an inhuman kinship with the entity which dwells here. But it was an entity so strong, so accustomed to mold the minds of its victims and use them like tools to create other tools, that we ourselves were reshaped without knowing it.
This strange new sense began very early to take shape in me. Kua reacted too, and Byrna. Sam? I don’t know. He’s gone. But as for me, I have changed.
Something stirred mysteriously through his flesh, and without the need to look down, Kern’s horizon-circling vision told him that light had begun to glow in him—fire—long, rolling loops of fire that stretched with incredible flexibility through the solid glass imprisoning him.
The ribbon of fire upon which Bruce’s body rode paused in its motion, hesitated, almost drew back. Kern felt dimly its surprise and its strange, inhuman hatred. But only dimly, for his own mind was too stunned with this final revelation to let any other feeling through.
Too malleable, he thought despairingly—flesh too malleable to hold its own form under the irresistible altering pull that was the Mountain. And now through the icy glass which held the humans rigid, two shapes of coiling flame turned lazily over and over—one shape supporting a human body and glowing incandescent with malevolence, the other still too amazed for emotion, but stretching its new limbs of fire with a sort of reluctant, voluptuous luxury as the endless ribbon rolled in convolutions of flame in and out of its own length. A strange, inhuman luxury, this, to stretch upon the firm,
