And they froze the motions of the boulders around me. For the boulders were moving—slowly, lumberingly. I couldn't spare them any attention, but my peripheral vision did pick up details. They had been boulders, I knew that. But—and here was one detail—they didn't look like inanimate rocks anymore. No, they looked like great beasts—like titanic hounds, crossed with the rocks of the earth in some kind of unholy breeding experiment. I could feel their eyes on me sometimes, and I felt the intensity of their hatred. Yet I could also feel that the hatred wasn't directed at me . I was irrelevant to them, I knew, just another feature of their environment, like the crashed Merlin or the clouds overhead. All of their attention was focused on the Dance, and on the crystal-fire air at ground zero. Slowly, they moved, but inexorably. They'd reach their goal sometime—I knew that, deep in my gut. What would they do when they got there? You got me, chummer.