When sleep took him he dreamed of wolves. Hunting, not to feed, but to deliver … something else; he knew not what. The quarry wandered alone, the quarry fled when it saw him. Brothers and sisters at his side, he pursued. Relentless, leagues passing effortlessly beneath his paws. The small, frightened creature could not elude them. He and his kin drew nearer, exhausting it against the slopes of hills, until finally it faltered, then collapsed. They surrounded it.
As they closed in, to deliver… what was to be delivered … the quarry vanished.
Shock, then despair.
He and his kin would circle the spot where she'd lain. Heads lifted skyward, mournful howls issuing from their throats. Howling without surcease. Until Toc the Younger blinked awake, in the embrace of the Matron, the turgid air of the cave seeming to dance with the fading echoes of his howls. The creature would tighten her hold, then. Whimpering, prodding the back of his neck with a fanged snout, her breath like sugared milk.
The cycles of his life. Sleep, then wakefulness punctuated by hallucinations. Smeared scenes of figures in golden sunlight, delusions of being a babe in his mother's arms, suckling at her breast — the Matron possessed no breasts, so he knew these to be delusions, yet was sustained by them none the less — and times when he began voiding his bladder and bowels, and she held him out when he did this, so he fouled only himself. She would then lick him clean, a gesture that stripped him of his last shreds of dignity.
Her embrace broke bones. The more he screamed with the pain, the tighter she held him. He had learned to suffer in silence. His bones knitted with preternatural swiftness. Sometimes unevenly. He knew himself to be malformed — his chest, his hips, the blades of his shoulders.
Then there came the visitations. A ghostly face, sheathed in the wrinkled visage of an old man, the hint of gleaming tusks, took form within his mind. Yellowed eyes that shone with glee fixed on his own.
Familiar, those overlapping faces, but Toc was unable to take his recognition any further.
The visitor would speak to him.
They are trapped, my friend. All but the T'lan Imass, who fears solitude. Why else would he not leave his companions? Swallowed in ice. Helpless. Frozen. The Seguleh — no need to fear them. Never was. I but played. And the woman! My rimed beauteous statue! Wolf and dog have vanished. Fled. Aye, the kin, brother of your eyes. fled. Tail between legs, hee hee!