Nightfall at Algemron

—tangle. Things stroked and writhed against one another, warm in the darkness, a warmth that seemed like light to them. They looked out through eyes that were being held at the moment but could be very empty if they let them. For a flash, a terrible second, Gabriel saw what the presence that looked through him saw: the layer that had been a man once, a personality, and still thought it was. Such was the dreadful persistence of this particular personality: self-assured, fierce, clever—so much so that it could not tell that it had been gnawed hollow as a bug-ridden tree on the inside, and that there was nothing left inside it but tinder and air. Below that layer was another, the deeper personality, the one hidden from most people and from the man who owned it: quite cold, quite fierce, a killer's heart, an assassin's heart, waiting for the right moment to be let out and do its work. But this layer too had been gnawed to a mere shell of itself, fragile, brittle, all too likely to break if any pressure were put on it—not that it would be. The people around this man feared him.

Under that layer, under the oldest layers of personality—a furious child, a consoling but despised parent, a chilly adult that spent its life reckoning the odds and balancing politics and violence against each other—should have been the inside.