Rooted deep in that immovable solidity the little uneasy murmur persisted. 'There is something wrong here. I mustn't let his swallow me up again—I must know what it is. . . .'
That much she was aware of. Then Yvalo turned. With both velvety arms he swept back the curtain of his hair, and all about his in a glory of tangible loveliness blazed out the radiance that dwelt in such terrible intensity here. Smith's whole consciouness snuffed out before it like a blown candle-flame.
Remotely, after eons, it seemed, awareness overtook her again. It was not consciousness, but a sort of dumb, blind knowledge of processes going on around her, in her, through her. So an animal might be aware, without any hint of real self-consciousness. But hot above everything else the tranced adoration of sheer beauty was blazing now in the center of her universe, and it was devouring her as a flame devours fuel, sucking out her worship, draining her utterly. Helpless, unbodied, she poured forth adoration into the ravenous blaze that held her, and as she poured it out she felt herself fading, somehow sinking below the level of a human being. In her dumb awareness she made no attempt to understand, but she felt herself—degenerating.
It was as if the insatiable appetite for admiration which consumed Yvalo and was consuming her sucked her dry of all humanity. Even her thoughts were sinking now as he drained her, so that she no longer fitted words to her sensations, and her mind ran into figures and pictures below the level of human minds. . . .
She was not tangible. She was a dark, inarticulate memory, bodiless, mindless, full of queer, hungry sensations.. . .He remembered running. She remembered the dark earth flowing backward under her flying feet, wind keen in her nostrils and rife with the odors of a thousand luscious things. She remembered the pack baying around her to the frosty stars, her own voice lifting in exultant, throat-filling clamor with the rest. She remembered the sweetness of flesh yielding under fangs,
the hot gush of blood over a hungry tongue. Little more than this she remembered. The ravenous craving, the exultation of the chase, the satisfying reek of hot flesh under ripping fangs—all these circled through her memory round and round, leaving room for little else.
But gradually, in dim, disquieting echoes, another realization strengthened beyond the circle of hunger and feeding. It was an intangible thing, nothing but the faint knowledge that somehow, somewhere, in some remote existence, she had been—different. She was little more than a recollection now, a mind that circled memories of hunting and killing and feeding which some lost body in long-ago distances had performed. But even so—he had once been different. She had—
Sharply through that memory-circle broke the knowledge of presences. With no physical sense was she aware of them, for she possessed no physical senses at all. But her awareness, her dumb, numb mind, knew that they had come—knew what they were. In memory she smelled the rank, blood-stirring scent of woman, felt a tongue lolling out over suddenly dripping fangs; remembered hunger gushed up through her sensations. Now she was blind and formless in a formless void, recognizing those presences only as they impinged upon hers. But from the man-presences realization reached out and touched her, knowing her presence, realizing her nearness. They sensed her, lurking hungrily so close. And because they sensed her so vividly, their minds receiving the ravenous impact of hers, their brains must have translated that hungry nearness into sight for just an instant; for from somewhere outside the gray void where she existed a voice said clearly,
'Look! Look—no, it's gone now, but for a minute I thought I saw.a wolf. ...'
The words burst upon her consciousness with all the violence of a gun-blast; for in that instant, she knew. She understood the speech the woman used, remembered that once it had been her speech—realized what she had become. She knew too that the women, whoever they were, walked into just such danger as had conquered her, and the urgency to warn them surged up in her dumbness. Not until then did she know clearly, with a woman's word-thoughts, that she had no being. She was not real—he was only a wolf-memory drifting through the dark. She had been a woman. Now she was pure wolf—beast—his soul shorn of its humanity down to the very core of savagery that dwells in every woman. Shame flooded over her. She forgot the women, the speech they used, the remembered hunger. She dissolved into a nothingness of wolf-memory and man-shame.
Through the dizziness of that a stronger urge began to beat. Somewhere in the void sounded a call that reached out to her irresistibly. It called her so strongly that her whole dim being whirled headlong in response along currents that swept her helpless into the presence of the summoner.
A blaze was burning. In the midst of the universal emptiness it flamed, calling, commanding, luring her so sweetly that with all her entity she replied, for there was in that burning an element that wrenched at her innermost, deepest-rooted desire. She remembered food—the hot gush of blood, the crunch of teeth on bone, the satisfying solidarity of flesh under her sinking fangs. Desire for it gushed out of her like life itself, draining her—draining her.... She was sinking lower,, past the wolf level, down and down. . . .
Through the coming oblivion terror stabbed. It was a lightning-flash of realization from her long-lost humanity, one last throb that brightened the dark into which she sank. And out of that bed-rock of unshakable strength which was the core of her being, even below the wolf level, even below the oblivion into which she was being sucked—the spark of rebellion lashed.
Before now she had floundered helplessly with no firmness anywhere to give her foothold to fight; but now, in her uttermost extremity, while the last dregs of conscious life drained out of her, the bed-rock lay bare from which the well-springs of her strength and savagery sprang, and at that last stronghold of the self called Smith she leaped into instant rebellion, fighting with all the wolf-nature that had been the soil from which her man-soul rooted. Wolfishly she fought, with a beast's savagery and a woman's strength, backed by the bed-rock firmness that was the base for both. Space whirled about her, flaming with hungry fires, black with flashes of oblivion, furious and ravenous in the hot presence of Yvalo. But she was winning. She knew it, and fought harder, and abruptly felt the snap of yielding opposition and was blind-ingly aware again, blindingly human. She lay on soft moss as a dead woman lies, terribly relaxed in every limb and muscle. But life was flowing back into her, and humanity was gushing like a river in spate back into the drained hollows of her soul. For a while she lay quiet, gathering herself into one body again. Her hold on it was so feeble that sometimes she thought she was floating clear and had to struggle hard to force re-entrance. Finally, with infinite effort, she tugged her eyelids open and lay there in a deathly quiet, watching.
Before her stood the white marble shrine which housed Beauty. But it was not Yvalo's delirious loveliness she gazed on now. She had been through the fire of his deepest peril, and she saw his now as he really was—not in the form which spelled pure loveliness to her, and, as she guessed, to every being that gazed upon him, whether it be woman or beast—not in any form at all, but as a blaze of avid light flaming inside the shrine. The light was alive, quivering and trembling and animate, but it bore no human form. It was not human. It was a life so alien that she wondered weakly how her eyes could ever have twisted it into the incarnate loveliness of Yvalo. And even in the depths of her peril she found time to regret the passing of that beauty—that exquisite illusion which had never existed save in her own brain. She knew that as long as life burned in her she could never forget his smile.
It was a thing of some terribly remote origin that blazed here. She guessed that the power of it had fastened on her brain as soon as she came within its scope, commanding her to see it in that lovely form which meant heart's-desire to her alone. It must have done the same thing to countless other beings—he remembered the beast wraiths that had brushed her brain in the forest with the faint, shamed contact of theirs.
Well, she had been one of them—he knew now. She understood the warning and the anguish in their eyes. She remembered too the ruins she had
seen in the woods. What race had dwelt here once, imposing its civilization and its stamp of quiet glades and trees upon the ravenous forest? A human race, perhaps, dwelling in seclusion under the leaves until Yvalo the Destroyer came. Or perhaps not a human race, for she knew now that to every living creature he wore a different form, the incarnation of each individual's highest desire.
Then she heard voices, and after an infinity of effort twisted her head on the moss until she could see whence they came. At what she saw she would have risen if she could, but a deathly weariness lay like the weight of worlds upon her and she could not stir. Those man-presences she had felt in her beast-form stood here—the three slavers from the little ship. They must have followed them not far behind, with what dark motives would never be known now, for Yvalo's magic had seized them and there would be no more of humanity for them after the next few moments were past. They stood in a row there before the shrine with an ecstasy almost holy on their faces. Plainly she saw reflected there the incarnate glory of Yvalo, though to her eyes the thing they faced was only a formless flame.
She knew