Abna was no longer alone with his Bride of the Shell, moving in wonder through the crumbling miles of the mountain’s interior. The Woebegot Eueuw, who had finally dredged up his true name and believed it to be Euglenens Paratrampsacus, had been burrowing in a ventricle deep within Das Kagel’s great white mass. He had not used the same cleft of ingress as the bewitched Abna. Eueuw had tunneled in from farther down the track and dug upward like a mole. Indeed, he resembled one as his head pushed up into the great echoing open space. He blinked extravagantly and shook earth and dust from his whiskery pointed snout. When his large sloping eyes cleared, he saw he had entered the vaulted emptiness of one of the arches looming over the pathway. A place Abna and his disquieted lover would eventually take.
Eueuw crawled out of his deep hole and shook the debris off two of the panniers he wore about his shoulders. Into these he started greedily cramming the word-rich crumbling stone. He then feasted on a large quantity of two folios and three octavos. Then he attempted to lift the ponderous weight of the leather bags back onto his sloping shoulders, But they were heavier than he was. So he sat next to his hole, incapable of movement and unable to understand what had happened. The bags that were hanging around his neck and scraping the broken ground looked like two sagging ears or, worse, like two pendulous dugs, swollen out of proportion to the meager frame of their dame. Such were the travails of many of the Woebegots, the miracle of intention withered by actuality.
Their mimicry of humanity was more firmly attached to the foibles and failures of the species than to their splendors and achievements. Many said this was because the Woebegots must have come from the sea or the endless waste of worthless mud that created the vast shore around the Lowlands. Their marine origins made them inferior to humans, being more of the haddock than of Adam. This explanation also fit their growing velocity of generation. As time went by, more were seen; shoals of their kind were climbing onto and populating the Firm-Lands. Some historians suggested that the polders themselves were created to contain the Filthlings, rather than to reclaim land from the encroaching sea, and that the most significant development was merely a by-product of their original function. However, this bewilderment was never a proven part of history.
Eueuw had remained stationary for more than two hours. Unable to cope with his predicament and longing to return to the comfort of his hole, eventually he did the only thing he could….He fell asleep.
Abna and his new lover had been moving through the broken arches all the time they made love, their passion losing compass but providing shifts of momentum. Their grip on each other sealed them from the world and kept all difference and misunderstanding at bay.
Eueuw sensed the lovers’ approach through his whiskers, which twitched out of sleep at the first vibration of their entrance. He became anxious about their nature, finding the tangled mixture of scents confusing; he pulled himself around in scruffy circles, the weight of his treasures making him pant and struggle.
The lovers saw him far off. At seeing the mole creature, Abna freed one hand from the humidity of his love’s shell and reached automatically for the dagger that was sheathed to his thigh. At the loss of contact, she also stretched out of the shell, away from their intimacy, opening and closing the long fingers of her other hand in a gesture of greeting. Eueuw did not know what to do: he had no speed because of the bags, he had no weapons, and he had no real language. So he just waited and shivered in advance of the oncoming meeting.
When they came within touching distance, Abna tried to hold his companion back, but she slipped her long fingers from his grasp. He was about to warn her or take command when he heard the word demon whispered over and over again in the translucent amber dusk of the arches. The condition of this strangeness overwhelmed him. The severing of touch had undone the spell; his blood ran back, pale and tepid, and sheltered under lymph. Abna shriveled into a reality that could not be, suddenly standing amid the crumbling arches in a light that had nothing to do with the world he knew and understood. He was with two beings that were more separate from him than any other beast or fowl that he had met or eaten. The temperature seemed to be dropping with the growing shock of his alienation. He looked at his hand, still tingling from her touch, but the sensation was wearing off as she glided away, toward the collapsed creature in their path. Abna’s knife hand knew what to do; it had been tutored in speed and contempt, cutting questions to shreds before they had time to attack or ask questions of him.
But his intention was weirdly suspended between his opposing hands. Then she made a mewing sound at the other thing crawling in the rubble and touched its paddle-shaped claws. It rubbed its bristling snout against her fingers and made a harsh purring sound that sounded like coal being shredded on a kitchen grater. Abna felt disgust, and that emotion opened a channel to a deeper, sullen reaction of jealousy and rejection. He had been forsaken in favor of a repulsive joke. He had been separated from his brother; he had been betrayed. He stared at the thing, which she now fondled, in growing rage.
The beauty of her face was hidden from him, and he saw only the volume of her shell: she was a travesty, a slithering mistake that no God would ever have created. She felt his transformation, his withdrawal into his homeland of bloodshed and fear. She tried to speak as she turned, holding out her other tentacled hand toward him. But he saw no kindness in the gesture; rather, it looked like a lewd invitation to join these sudden abnormalities in a dance of depravity, to become one with them in some unknown coupling.
His recent experiences of love and warmth drained away, sullied into a mangled memory of physical slipperiness and unnatural contortion—and for that moment, it seemed true: they looked like dancers frozen in a collapsed dyad of grotesque sexuality. Then one of the leaking arches screamed and gave way, startling the fragile tableau into action: Eueuw let go of the beauty’s wonderful touch and covered his head. Abna’s knife hand took control, and he lunged at the threatening monsters. The lady slid sideways and around to block the progress of the meaningless attack.
The chamber shifted shape, its confines changing as earth and air shook with the collapse of tons of stone and words. After the sound settled and the larger stones agreed to stillness, lighter noises could be heard in the rubble: snapped and mangled words, some still twitching in uncontrollable incomprehension. Eueuw was making the most noise. Miraculously untouched by the falling masses, he had witnessed the blow that cracked the beauty’s shell, and he was horrified by her injuries. Some of her delicate inner portion must have been squashed and then sheared by the sharp edges of her wrecked shell. A rope of white substance had bled and swollen away from her body; it was pungent but still alive, and it seemed to be seeking a place of its own to hide across the rough floor. The featured parts of her had gone, shrinking back into the interior of her shell for protection. Nothing of the gentle face or tendriled hair could be seen. Abna, who had been tripped by the beauty in the full force of his onslaught, had fallen headfirst into Eueuw’s hole, so that only his hips and legs remained in sight, waving in the gritty air. Clouds of stone, dust, and scribble spluttered around his frantic movements, giving his legs a wild and disturbing appearance and making their disembodied agitation the most peculiar occupants of this crumbling domain.