Mechanicum

'Paranoid am I?' smiled Zouche. 'Remind me of that when this Dragon's devouring you, Dalia. See how paranoid I am then, eh?'

Eventually, Semyon brought them out onto a wide ledge high up in a glittering cavern of blinding silver that put Dalia in mind of the hollow core of the planet, such was its size. It was the largest internal space any of them had ever seen or could imagine, the uttermost reaches soaring above and below them, and the shimmering walls curving out to either side of them like the largest amphitheatre ever conceived.

'Behold the Dragon!' cried Semyon, moving to stand before a wooden lectern that was incongruous for its very normality. A thick book with a worn leather binding sat atop the lectern, next to a simple quill and inkwell.

Dalia looked out over the vast expanse of silver that was the interior of the cave, half-expecting to see some winged beast launch itself from its lair.

She glanced over at Caxton and Rho-mu 31, who both shrugged, both equally as puzzled as her. Severine shuffled forward to the edge of the jutting promontory they stood on, her eyes with a glazed, faraway look.

'Severine, watch out,' cautioned Zouche, looking over the edge. 'It's a long way down.'

'This place feels… strange,' said Severine, a tremor of disquiet in her voice. 'Do any of the rest of you feel that?'

Dalia saw Severine looking in confusion at the distant walls of the gargantuan cavern, blinking rapidly and shaking her head as though trying to dislodge a troublesome thought.

'If the Dragon is chained somewhere in here, I expect it's bound to feel a little strange,' said Dalia. She squinted at the far off walls, though their unbroken, reflective sheen made it hard to focus properly.

'No,' insisted Severine, pointing with her good arm at the vast shimmering silver walls and roof. 'It's more than that. The angles and the perspective… they're… all… wrong! Look!'

As though Severine's words had unlocked some hidden aspect of the cavern, each of them cried out as the sheer impossibility of its geometry, previously concealed from their frail human senses, was suddenly and horrifyingly revealed.

Dalia blinked in confusion as a sudden wave of vertigo seized her, and she grasped Rho-mu 31's arm to steady herself. Though her eyes told her that the walls of the cavern were impossibly distant, her brain could not mesh what she was seeing and what her mind was processing.

The angles were impossible, the geometry insane. Distance was irrelevant and perspective a lie. Every rule of normality was turned upside down in an instant and the natural order of the universe was overthrown in this new, terrifying vision of distorted reality. The cavern seemed to pulse in every direction at once, compressing and contracting in unfeasible ways, moving as rock was never meant to move.

This was no cavern. Was this entire space, the walls and floor, the air and every molecule within it, part of some vast intelligence, a being or construct of ancient malice and phenomenal, primeval power? Such a thing had no name; for what use would a being that had brought entire civilisations into existence and then snuffed them out on a whim have of a name? It had been abroad in the galaxy for millions of years before humanity had been a breath in the creator's mouth, had drunk the hearts of stars and been worshipped as a god in a thousand galaxies.

It was everywhere and nowhere at once. All powerful and trapped at the same time.

The monstrous horror of its very existence threatened to shatter the walls of her mind, and in desperation, Dalia looked down at her feet in an attempt to convince herself that the laws of perspective still held true in relation to her own body. Her existence in the face of this infinite impossibility was meaningless, but she recognised that only by small victories might she hold onto her fracturing reason.

'No,' she whispered, feeling her grip on the three-dimensionality of her surroundings slipping as the distance to her feet seemed to stretch out into infinity. Her vertigo suddenly swamped her and she dropped to her knees as her vision stretched and swelled, the interior of the cavern suddenly seeming to be as vast as the universe and as compressed as a singularity within the same instant.

She felt the threads of her sanity unravelling in the face of this distorted reality, her brain unable to cope with the sensory overload it was failing to process.

A hand grasped the sleeve of her robe, and she looked into the lined, serious face of Zouche. With a gasping snap, her focus returned, as though the squat machinist was an anchor of solidity in an ocean of madness.

'Don't look at it,' advised Zouche. 'Keep focused on me!'

Dalia nodded, her senses numbed by the violated angles and utter wrongness of the cavern walls and the thing they cloaked from view. How had she not noticed it before? Had it taken her senses a moment to try to process the sheer impossibility of what she saw?