And then his legs crumbled beneath him, and Kael McCanahan went down, onto the tiled yellow flooring of the tower room.
He floated bodiless in space. The stars swirled about him, moving endlessly in their orbits. This was death, he knew. But it was a strange form of death, for here and there he could recognize familiar constellations, saw nebulae and galaxies that he knew.
The voice swirled about him, rumbling out of the black stretches of space itself. The McCanahan could feel eyes on him, hidden eyes that probed at him, lancing through him with the remorseless certainty of a surgeon's electroniscalpel.
_This is a Terran. A man named McCanahan. He is frightened!_
_He was within the tower. Only Noorlythin could live in that trap of hell. I do not understand!_
Something touched him, as gently as a Spring breeze off the sea. And with the touching, the eyes of Kael McCanahan came open to the robed figures that floated between the stars. He tried to see their faces, but only a blinding whiteness returned his stare, under the low hoods of the robes.
_Seek not our faces, Terran. To you, we are as the sun!_
His tongue was thick and swollen. He mumbled. He swallowed, as if to clear his throat.
"Where am I? Who are you? I walked into the tower and--"
What had happened to him on that yellow floor? His knees had buckled and he had gone down with an intangible force crushing him. Kael shook his head.
_We are the Doyen. An ancient race, a race of once-men who have lived out the span of our lives a million centuries. In that time, we changed. Our bodies evolved upward from their primal shape, striving always to progress to that last, final shape of all._
_Once he was. But Noorlythin could never forget the adoration that was showered on us by the sfarri. He hungered to be worshipped as a god, as once he was, many eons ago. Noorlythin turned his back to us, the Doyen. He has gone back, resuming the primal shapes of the men whose race is young._
Fear came to McCanahan there among the stars. It crept in through the unspoken words of the robed things, clutching at his mind with frozen fingers. He shook uncontrollably before he could assert himself.
_He has broken the Doyen law. He has become as an animal. With his powers, he can be a god to any primal race. No primate can stand to him, and well he knows it. When he is ready, when he has used the sfarri to conquer all the primal races of the galaxy, he will ascend into the living sacristy of the Temple of Sharrador. There, once again, he will be worshipped with living sacrifices, with orgies that only a primal race can conceive and execute._