The borrowed hands worked the fishing line, and THE Sealed One mused, cruel and ominous and unhurried.
"The trouble with unique lifeforms," it murmured, to the crimson sea, to no one, "is that they are fed by exactly the thing you would use to kill a lesser one. You strike an ordinary being unprepared, and it dies, and that is the end of it. You strike a being like Osmont unprepared, and you have not attacked him. You have nourished him. Every adversity such anomaly survives makes him grander. His whole foundation is built to convert resistance into growth." The borrowed mouth curved.
"He cannot be fed adversity. So I will not feed him any. At least, not anymore..."
The line drifted in the red.
