Waking, he moved to seize and destroy it, as he would have done a physical enemy. But already the nightmare wavered, subsided. He could not recall detail, only the dread and anguish that spread over him like a mountain of black stone. Yet its colour had not been black. It had been smoulder-red, warm, like fire beneath the sea. In itself even so the colour was not favourable. Thought-shapes bubbled through the psychic blowhole of Brightshade’s exquisitely hamfisted inner mind. Even unremembering he knew what this input meant. Lionwolf. Ah, since the first awareness of that unique other being, his half-brother, the whale Brightshade had floundered. His ideal and virtually brainless path of unmitigated living and enjoyment had been soiled. But striking out, made into an assassin by their father, Zeth, Brightshade had ultimately failed at murder more than once. Thereafter the vicious insane assaults of Zzth had slung the whale to the floor of this north-eastern ocean. Here beneath an element frozen and un, someone now forgotten had come unheralded to comfort him.
