The core of the serpent was a storm that did not move.
Or rather, it moved in a way that had nothing to do with going anywhere. The four of them stood at the mouth of a chamber vaster than the coil that had brought them to it, and across the whole of that chamber ran rivers.
Rivers of time. They wheeled in slow circles around the center, ring inside ring, dozens of them, each one a current of raw Dimensionality of Time given a shape and a course, and where a river passed near the wall the stone aged a thousand years in an instant and un-aged a thousand more as the current curved away.
One ring ran forward. The next ran back. The next ran forward again, faster, and the air between them shimmered where the two speeds met, so that a mote of dust caught in the seam might be young on one side of itself and ancient on the other.
At the very center, held in the still eye where all the rings turned around nothing, a quill spun!
