A cover of steam was ascending from the water, darkening the trees behind it. Agenor was drifting, half-lowered, become a figure of practically unrelieved dark, his skin firm and gurgled and furrowed, his arms beating ineffectively. An appalling dark one-legged doll almost the size of a man. Slender smoke was lifting from him, the internal meat actually consuming. Foaming commotions came from his lipless scar of a mouth. “Damn!” said Beheim, understanding that he would need to go down into the water to complete him, and not in the slightest degree sure that he needed. Agenor was turning gradually, as though taken by an inactive current, and this confused Beheim, appearing to be in opposition to actual laws. Then, at that point, something happened even more in opposition to the normal.
The water quickly encompassing Agenor started to glimmer—he may have been releasing some terrific silver liquid—shaping a diagram around his body, and from the parts in his skin, a fine brilliance started to sparkle forward, a pale gleaming radiation that developed progressively bright, the different pillars becoming unmistakable in the agony of the pit, until it created the impression that a frightful center had been uncovered profound inside that roasted shell. The water lapped with expanding power at the dividers of the pit, slopping higher, cutting down hunks of soil. The light waxed more splendid yet. Maybe stars were being brought into the world in the doomed tissue, and soon the tissue began to drop away, in strips, in cuts, as though Agenor were being fileted. Not long from there on the organs and digestion tracts became apparent, saturated with light, pressed conveniently in their holes, every one of the personal abhorrences of a customary life. The light roused them to a sort of incredible rot; they lost shape, pulped, their substance streamed into a greenish ooze that blended with the water, and finally the skeleton was left encompassed in a capsule of shadow, rather like the shadow of a casket. No normal rack of bones, this—a build of gleaming wires set with nine places of glowing splendor, taking after the guide of a group of stars that one may find in a manual for the sky, however the quadrant of the sky wherein this heavenly body governed was obscure to Beheim. The water fumed and lashed about, and the bones of the skeleton started to float separated, as though the remainder of the ligament were dissolving, the joints losing their hold, making of it a silver riddle of stars and bones that spun about in the upset water, moving to its own rhythms, its own choppiness, and afterward even these pieces encountered a disintegration, the shiny stuff of their pith obscuring and conjoining with the less lambent liquid of the water, until at the last there was a throwing pewter-hued ocean inside the pit, similar to a component of a little tempest. Beheim thought it was finished, however at that point a bassy murmuring vibration gave from the pit, shaking the ground underneath his feet. Frightened, he yanked Alexandra back from the edge and they moved meekly upslope toward the haven of the pines. The murmuring developed stronger, its dim note appearing to diminish the sun, to spread new profundities of shadow from the branches that overhung the clearing, and with a dangerousness like that of a fountain of liquid magma penetrating the earth, its power thumping Beheim and Alexandra onto their backs, whatever stayed in the pit flew vertically in a light emission stuff… not liquid, not strong, but rather having the characteristics of both, a wide surge of Agenor’s fundamental things spilling into the sky, becoming progressively pale against the light, and as the murmuring passed on, imagining an inquisitive shape in the upper ranges of the sky, an obscure shadowy figure, a seal or some likeness thereof—or so Beheim considered it—a sigil, the engraving of some enigmatic significance too many-sided to even think about holding in the brain besides as image, extremely like the image he found to his eye after hearing the melody of his blood, and he contemplated whether the fantastic plan that specific shape had appeared to mean had just been the guarantee of this horrendous demise.