He was attacked. The enemy was on him. He felt a sudden ghastly rending as claws tore into him from above, the alien pain garbled in translation, cramming his brain with black nausea and dread. He flopped in death-stricken convulsion, his face slid apart in a nightmare extrusion of razored mandibles, and he caught a leg and sheared it off at the joint; he smelled hot hunger and pain and the bright hot radiance of his own juices bursting, and then the cold, the seeping, the bright spark fading to become one with the old stone and the age and the dark...