The crimson witch

showed itself just then…
        It came around the edge of the woods, knocking over a small tree and crushing bushes and logs beneath it, rolling over stones that lay in its pathway, never, ever going around anything. It came forward like a tank, like the greatly increased tread of a tank somehow enlarged and enlarged and enlarged-and given sentience. It was a great worm of sorts, easily a hundred feet in length, each glossy, yellow segment perhaps four or five feet across and bristled with various sizes and lengths of black and orange and yellow hairs. It's main segment towered fifty feet in the air as it moved in front of the grove, its anterior segments thrusting off the ground, another fifty feet of posterior kicking and writhing, propelling it toward them at a frightening speed. It was vaguely reminiscent of a centipede, the one insect that Jake, always and still, had irrationally feared in his own worldline, though its glossy segments were studded with the underdeveloped cilia instead of real legs, and though it could not truthfully be said it scitter-walked like a centipede but slithered, instead, like a blacksnake, head whipping high and proud.
        Head… The oral segment itself was enough to give him nightmares for the rest of his life. The bulb of yellow flesh, devoid of hair and, therefore, naked in comparison to the cilia-marked other segments was capped by a sucking, oval mouth that drew upon the air like a vacuum cleaner. Two sensory swaths comparable to eyes and two others apparently for olfactory sensitivity ringed that mouth with pulsating gray light filling them like dimmed light bulbs.
        “Run!” Jake shouted. “We can't fight it!”
        “Where?” she asked. She thought of lifting herself, but she could not lift him, except perhaps with a great wind. But she could never leave the dragon to its mercy, and the dragon would need too large a wind, indeed.
        “Back over the bridge,” he answered.
        They turned and stumbled toward the natural bridge that Jake and Kaliglia had passed over not very long ago, Jake holding Cheryn with his arm, the giant reptile lumbering last, protecting their rear from the horror that moved after them.
        But they had gone only half the distance to the gorge when there was a screeching and chittering ahead of them-and a second centipedelike monster pulled itself over the gorge wall onto the bridge, successfully blocking their departure. They stood for a moment, watching it in disbelief. Then they turned. The first beast was gaining on them, its mouth drawing in air with an audible, wet gurgling, blowing it out again through another hole in its fifth segment.
        “They're Thobs!” Cheryn said in sudden realization. Her tone was based on joy.
        “What?” Jake pressed her close, his heart racing. His mind was filled with centipede scenes from his home worldline-finding them in the bathroom of their summer cottage and racing for someone to come and kill them… And now all those wriggling, hairy centipedes that he had had lulled were coming back, larger-much, much larger!-than life to revenge themselves…
        “There must be a Talented nearby,” she explained. “Perhaps there was one traveling with the manbats. These beasts are not real. They're Thought Objects. Thobs.”
        “Then we have nothing to fear?”
        “Oh, yes we do!”
        “But-”
        “They could kill us easily if they were real. And they can still kill us even though they have a thought-coagulation substance that can have affect on this world, a cohesion of pseudo-matter, psionic force. But with our own Thobs, we can fight back!”
        The centipede slithered closer, its leathery segments shushing across the ground. The second lay just across the bridge, blocking their only pathway to safety.
        Cheryn wrinkled her brow, concentrated.
        She muttered the appropriate curses.
        Sweat beaded her forehead.
        The centipede came anyway.
        Suddenly the earth between them and the beast was bristled with iron spikes as long as a man's arm and as thick. The points of the spikes gleamed blackly in the sun.
        The centipede rolled onto them. It screamed a different sort of scream. Its unreal insides spilled across the ground, sticky yellow fluid like syrup. It stopped approaching, tried to turn and slither off the stakes. It only gutted itself more completely. It toppled full length onto the spears,