The firefly form seemed to change shape as it moved. For a time, my senses kept rejecting the tiny subliminal glimpses that I knew must be coming through to me. I heard Random gasp beside me, and it seemed to breach my subconscious dam. A horde of impressions flooded my mind.
It seemed to tower hugely in that always unsubstantial-seeming chamber. Then shrink, die down, almost to nothing. It seemed a slim woman for a moment-possibly Dara, her hair lightened by the glow, streaming, crackling with static electricity. Then it was not hair, but great, curved horns from some wide, uncertain brow, whose crook-legged owner struggled to shuffle hoofs along the blazing way. Then something else . . . An enormouse cat . . . A faceless woman . . . A bright-winged thing of indescribable beauty . . . A tower of ashes . . .
“Dara!” I cried out. “Is that you?”
My voice echoed back, and that was all. Whoever/ whatever it was struggled now with the Final Veil. My muscles strained forward in unwilling sympathy with the effort.
Finally, it burst through.
Yes, it was Dara! Tall and magnificent now. Both beautiful and somehow horrible at the same time. The sight of her tore at the fabric of my mind. Her arms were upraised in exultation and an inhuman laughter flowed from her lips. I wanted to look away, yet I could not move. Had I truely held, caressed, made love to-that? I was mightily repelled and simultaneously attracted as I had never been before. I could not understand this overwhelming ambivalence. Then she looked at me.
The laughter ceased. Her altered voice rang out. “Lord Corwin, are you liege of Amber now?”
From somewhere, I managed a reply. “For all practical purposes,” I said.
“Good! Then behold your nemesis!”
“Who are you? What are you?”
“You will never know,” she said. “It is just exactly too late now.”
“I do not understand. What do you mean?”
“Amber,” she said, “will be destroyed.” And she vanished.
“What the hell,” said Random then, “was that?” I shook my head.
“I do not know. I really do not know. And I feel ..that it is the most important thing in the world that we find out.”
He gripped my arm.
“Corwin,” he said. “She-it-meant it. And it may be possible, you know.”
I nodded. “I know.”
“What are we going to do now?”
I resheathed Grayswandir and turned back toward the door.
“Pick up the pieces,” I said. “I have what I thought I always wanted within my grasp now, and I must secure it. And I cannot wait for what is to come. I must seek it out and stop it before it ever reaches Amber.”
“Do you know where to seek it?” he asked.
We turned up the tunnel.
“I believe it lies at the other end of the black road,” I said.
We moved on through the cavern to the stairs where the dead man lay and went round and round above him in the dark.