Status Updates From Over Sea, Under Stone (The ...

Into the air over their heads, a dog howled: a long weird note so unexpected and anguished that for a moment they all stopped dead. It echoed slow through the harbor, a freezing inhuman wail that had in it all the warning and terror that ever was in the world.

Now the moon dominated the sky; a sky deepening after the sunset to a strange grey-black, with all but the brightest stars dimmed by the milky luminous sheen that flowed over sky and sea without seeming to come from the moon at all.

The harbour was already darkening into shadow. As they looked, the sun seemed gradually to fall, until the unbearable brightness of it was over the outlined fingers of the group of standing stones, and the stones themselves became invisible in the blaze.

The children stood together, looking down. The land before them was unfamiliar, a silent, secret world of mounded peaks and invisible valleys, all its colours merging in a haze of summer heat.