, its sound the chiming crash of
splintering glass.

"Try not to change too much," she warned.

"Change?" Even the word sounded strange to him, as she said it. He felt
a swift surge of anger. There was no change in him--_none_!

The tinkling bell-tones matched the swirl of his emotion and rose to
jangling, tormented heights. It was shrill, maniacal tumult, that ranged
upward and upward into octaves beyond sound. It was a rollicking,
tortured insanity. Windbells chiming, jangled; tinkling, shimmering,
exploding inside his brain. Windbells shattering in a hurricane of sound
and ecstasy.

With his fists, Newlin pounded at his bursting skull. Pain deadened
perception, gave him a moment's relief.

He was not changing, he shouted in loud defense. He was not!

Songeen poised, watching. Her body-outlines swirled and altered in swift
mutations before his eyes. She was not woman now. Not even human. She
danced and flickered and gibbered at him. She was jeweled movement.
Change. She was as crystalline as the forest, as molten emerald as the
sky. Points of fire inside her caught and flared and burned inside his
eyes. She was not Songeen!

Newlin screamed. He looked down at his hands. He screamed again, louder.
His hands were transparent as glass, and as fluid as water. Outlines
wavered, changed.

"Try not to change too much," Songeen pleaded. But her voice joined the
clattering crystalline tumult which raged about him. He was cracking. He
could feel the seams in his mind giving way.

Like a great, floundering beast, he charged toward her. Forms of brittle
crystal shattered at his touch. Shattered into sound and pain. The
forest-forms changed color, echoing his violence. New vortices of
movement converged upon him. Perceptions expanded and radiance showered
about him, through him.

The hovering, dancing crystal notes were now visible. Beads of light,
dripping from a sky of light. They were sound a color, bright, bursting
bubbles of sound. Their rhythmic tempos increased, murmur swelled into
insistent roaring and the jangling of insane dissonance. Vitreous
grotesques shimmered like a forest of aspens quivering in wind and
sunlight. Glassy fragments of splintered sound poured in floods from sky
and ground. Trampled grass gave way under his feet in brittle crunching,
and the brush shivered at his touch, dissolving into chill slivers of
slashing sound.

Blood was dripping. The forest changed color, as if crimson stain spre