We are standing alone, the three of us, when it arrives, called by the relentless drums.  And my first thought is:<br/><br/><em>It does not make sense.</em><br/><br/>The mind demands sense.  It needs sense to grease the rails - to ease the friction inspired by too many moving parts in the intellect forced along by a highly unpredictable brew of emotions.  It needs up not to be down, red not to be green, the dead to stay dead.<br/><br/><em>Eyes to stay out of mouths; claws on the ends of fingers to have a set number.</em><br/><br/>It needs science.  It needs ettiquette.  It needs measurement.  It needs reasons.<br/><br/>It is not infallible, and it comes with a cost.  How many times have I accidentally responded to some merchant wishing that I would enjoy their product with, "You too," in expectation of them bidding me a good day?  How many times have I rolled to the left side of the bed to accomodate a lover that is not yet there?  So much thought is spent on not thinking.<br/><br/>It needs shape.  It needs motions.  It needs history.  It needs an end.<br/><br/>Then the mind has to experience the kind of thing that heaves its pachydermal mass out of the mist from the direction of the city.  And then the mind sees venom squirting from a brocade of gibbering sphincters higher than the eave of a chieftain's hall.  And then the mind smells what the air from places behind the stars smells like when wheezed through a mouth bigger than a barn door.  And then the mind hears what flesh that will not stay still in a set measure of mass, volume, density sounds like.<br/><br/>Then the mind does not know what to do.<br/><br/>Run.  Wait.  Beg.  Love.  Scream.  Kneel.  Sick up.  Laugh.  Take deep, deep breaths.  Consult a physician.  Cry for a priest.  Ask for more gods.  Yell for mother.  Make it go away.<br/><br/>Or just give up.<br/><br/>And the mind wants to shut down.<br/><br/>And for a moment, seeing it -<strong>It</strong>- shove out of the mist, moving like a building that shifts from one collapse to the next, my mind wants to end itself.  It wants to start all over.  It wants out.<br/><br/>And for a moment, I just smell that incomparable smell from its innumerable orifices, and watch its indescribable musculature pull its weird flesh forward, and I hear it moan - a moan that sounds like it took five billion years to get here and bathe me in its humid contempt.<br/><br/>And there is, almost, no second thought.  One banyan-trunk of a foreleg - or tendril, or simply "limb" - comes whistling down at me from two stories up, fast as an arrow.  When it hits the water, the surface tension of the bog explodes like a glass bowl around a bomb.<br/><br/>How I escaped getting hit, I could not tell you.  It could have been reflex.  It could have been Marius or Amara pulling me out of the way.  It could have been sheer luck.  I could not tell you; I was not there to say.  My mind was not present.<br/><br/>But a moment later I am blinking, and poised to fight, and my mind is no longer nothingness.  It is quicksilver.<br/><br/>I stare at what the drums brought, and though my senses cannot contain what they experience, the emotion the null-sight of it elicits is enough.  The first instant - the one fixed like a grain of glass with the sharp, bright demand of my mind - is gone.  The second instant, action, arrives.<br/><br/>I draw my sword.<strong>It</strong>draws tentacles as numerous as hair; claws; eyes; acid.<br/><br/>It moans, and the drums climb,<strong>BOOM</strong>,<strong>BOOM</strong>,<strong>BOOM</strong>, and the bog rustles with screeching birds as it slouches up over us, but as large as it gets, my cry is larger, louder:<br/><br/>I may not know what this is.  Some things cannot be known.  But I know what to do:<br/><br/><em><strong>"Kill it!"</strong></em>