Steve Shell

Was there a price to pay?

No.

Of course, power always comes at a cost.

But the strong, the ruthless, are willing to pay the bill.

Today, the account would be paid in pain.

And that was fine with Polly.

Her pain was only a small sacrifice in the face of her father's ambitions.

And in any case, it was necessary in order to fulfill her mission.

Her daddy needed to impart some knowledge to her.

The complexity of which would boil any wholly human mind in its skull like an egg.

And Polly had been built close enough to human that it would cost her.

But she could handle it.

She could always handle it.

Darkness poured into Polly Barrow's mind.

In a language she could not yet read, though she recognized some of the symbol as those adorning Barrow's town sign, and knew it must be the same that her daddy had used long before her birth to crack the skin of the world and establish his burrow deep beneath Barrow House.

Her brain was flooded with the strange symbols.

Barbs and swirls of some alien geometry that did not quite square with physics.

And she felt her mind might shatter from the terrible beauty of them.

She clutched her hands to her head as if she could physically help hold it inside her skull.

And her body began to tremble and jerk.