Snow fell over THE Infinite Carcosa, slow and quiet and endless, because THE Long Night still held its effects everywhere, even here, where the snow drifted down onto rivers of infinity and vanished into them without a sound.
Octavius Infinitum hung in the air above one of those rivers with his arms bound behind him in chains of pale falling-star light of Immensity, and the infinity inside his body burned against the chains and could not break them. Beside him were the two other Ancients of his dominion and the ten Established Immense Ones who had followed them, every one of them bound the same way, every one of them bleeding light from wounds that would take an years to close.
They had carved out a dominion of their own in the Carcosa long ago, a small and stubborn stretch of infinite currents that answered to no one, and an hour ago that had ended.
