The first dive came before I'd finished the thought.
There was no cry, no shadow, no rush of wings — just a line of wrong-feeling air, a pressure behind my left ear that shouldn't have been there, and my body moving before my brain signed off on it.
I dropped.
Something went past the top of my skull close enough to part my hair, a black-crimson streak that cracked the frost where I'd been standing and was gone again, back up into the nothing overhead before the ice finished spitting chips into the dark. The cold of its passing stayed behind on my scalp, a thin wet band where the wind of it had touched me.
I stayed crouched there a second, breathing. My knees had found a seam in the black stone, and I could feel the frost through my trousers, already numbing the skin.
'That was my head. That was where my head lives.'
Above me the layer had no ceiling I could find, just a starless dark that swallowed the top of my vision and hid whatever was circling somewhere in it.
