five
Jadwiga woke alone, and yet not alone. It was nothing she could see or hear, not the horrifying mass of shadows or the reverberating not-a-voice, but she was certain even before she woke fully that there was someone else nearby. She sat up stiffly and opened her eyes to find that the vast, never-ending gray had acquired a terrain while she slept. A faint, almost imperceptible undulation rolled away toward the line where a horizon should have been. She blinked once, and something appeared atop a faraway rise, a dark spot at the very furthest reaches of her vision.
“I will not be owned,” she whispered, and she rose and turned to walk away from it. Still, it was there, ahead of her, just at the top of that faraway rise. She twisted to look over her shoulder, but there was nothing behin
