The thing in the mud did not rise quickly.

It unfolded.

First came fingers—too long, jointed like the memory of branches that had once tried to hold a dying body down. Then a wrist. Then the slow, deliberate push of arms that had never been invited to the first night and had been waiting underneath it anyway. The mud of the contested origin sucked and released with a sound like a mouth deciding whether to keep its secret or spit it out. Black blood and syllable-light mixed in the depressions its hands left behind.

Zelda felt it through the eight-syllable name like a splinter driven under the nail of the...