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she cried, hanging onto Arlena’s arm. They saw it drop like a stone behind a clump of trees.
    ‘That’s Falin’s farm,’ Estarinel said. And he felt knowledge and terror flood through him, and he was shouting, ‘We’ve got to help! Arlena – get down to the farm and warn our parents. Oh ye gods, where’s Lothwyn? Go on, hurry!' And his sister was on her cob and galloping down the valley. Gellyn had dropped his seedling trays and was running, running, as if in a nightmare, back towards the village.
    Estarinel remembered running across the valley and down towards his friend’s farm only as struggling through a heavy grey sea. Whether it was the noxious exhalations of the Worm, or his own terror that made the journey so slow and painful, he didn’t know. Lilithea was behind him, trapped in her own cell of agony and fear. How could the world could be so normal, so full of sun and joy one moment, and drowning in horror the next? It was more incomprehensible than the worst nightmare.
    ‘Why us? Why send this thing to us?’ she kept gasping, the words escaping her lips in soundless screams.
    Estarinel ran through the trees and gained the farm. Many images flashed before his eyes, but he didn’t take them in, for the Worm itself was before him and he saw nothing else. It was lying on what had been Falin’s house. Like a beached whale, a gross immovable slug it lay on the ruins, blood running from its fissured lips. The colours of its shapeless form were ghastly, like wet rusting iron overlaid by a filmy skin. In its ugly, heavy head two tiny blue eyes glinted malignly, while in a third, empty, eye socket, muscles twitched.
    All this Estarinel took in, in a split-second, for immediately the thing leapt into the air with impossible speed for its bulk. Estarinel threw himself to the ground with a scream. Over his head the Worm took off with a deafening, groaning, continuous roar and its body seemed to pass endlessly over him as he looked up; an infinite tube of wrinkled, sickening, evil flesh.
    A stream of searing fluid fell from its mouth, striking the ground only a few feet from him. He lay for a long time without moving, until he felt Lilithea’s hand on his arm, and heard her voice crying urgently.
    ‘E’rinel! E’rinel!’
    He stood up, and saw the devastation around them. The trees through which they had just run were now blackened ash; the fields and plants all around were scorched and smoking. Pools of the steaming fluid lay everywhere, vile odours rising from them. And the farm where Falin’s family had lived was rubble, with spars of broken timber sticking out. Horror flooded Estarinel and Lilithea, and they stood clinging to each other. As they watched, they saw Falin and Sinmiel emerge from the ruins, weeping.
    ‘Our parents, our parents,’ Falin cried when he saw Estarinel and Lilithea. ‘My mother went outside – to frighten it off, she said–’ he began laughing in hysterical despair, ‘– it just seized her, like a doll–’ He trailed unintelligibly into tears.
    Lilithea stretched out her hand as Falin and his sister began to stumble towards their friends. But Sinmiel missed her footing and stepped into one of the fluid pools. They watched, helpless and lost in disbelief, as she screamed in agony and collapsed. They all ran to help, but she was already dying, gasping convulsively as the acid consumed her.
    They dragged her out, tried to hold her, but their skin blistered wherever the substance touched. In the end they could only watch, speechless with grief as she died between them; the same four who had that morning ridden joking and laughing through sunlight.
    ‘Oh – our farm, the village!’ Estarinel said hoarsely.
    ‘What can we do? Powerless to save even Sinmiel’s life.’ Falin lurched away, would have collapsed onto the poisoned ground had Estarinel not caught him.
    The village itself had been spared, but many others had been seared and burnt, the blood of the people slavered