Glorp Viscous wanted to swallow the world, but Glorp could not even find the door. Somewhere in this fog drifted the other ooze-ghosts, the crazed green minds that Glorp hungered to merge with. One massive body. One devouring will. Glorp had felt them for years, a pull in the marrow, a promise. Now Glorp hovered above the black water and turned, and turned, and drifted the same slow circle again. The fog ate every trail. Glorp's glossy limbs stretched out and found nothing. No warmth, no direction, no thread to follow. Twice Glorp thought a shape moved ahead. Twice it was only Glorp's own ripple sliding back through the mist. Rage bubbled up Glorp's translucent chest. To be so hungry and so blind at once was worse than starving. Then something landed on Glorp's shoulder. It was a moth. Small, pale, with soft-patterned wings that curled like smoke. It sat on the wet green surface and did not sink. Its wings twitched toward the fog, then twitched again, the same direction each time. It was pointing. Glorp went still. "You feel them," Glorp said. The moth's antennae bent forward. It felt what Glorp could not. Glorp opened a pocket in the soft jelly of its chest. The moth crawled inside, folded its wings, and glowed there like a swallowed lantern. At once a tug ran through Glorp's whole body. Warm. Certain. A line pulled taut into the dark. Glorp followed it. No more circles. The fog peeled away in ragged sheets as Glorp drifted straight and fast. The moth guided from within, its wings turning left, then right, and Glorp obeyed each shiver. The pull grew stronger. Closer. Glorp's whole surface trembled with want. The fog broke. Ahead, a knot of pale shapes drifted low over the water. They flapped and glowed and fluttered. But they were not ooze-ghosts. They were books. Dozens of them, spectral and torn, their loose pages beating like wings, their spines trailing threads of mist. Ghost books. The moth had guided true to the source of the pull, and the pull came from these. Glorp stopped short. The books drifted apart as Glorp neared, then closed ranks, circling. Old voices leaked from their pages, dry and whispering, a hundred dead stories at once. They did not flee. They watched. Glorp had wanted crazed minds to join. Here were minds, of a kind, and they were already many, and they were already awake. The moth twitched hard inside Glorp's chest, pointing past the books, deeper still. The ooze-ghosts lay beyond. But the books had noticed Glorp now, and their whispering rose, and they drew tighter, and the way forward closed behind their fluttering wall. Glorp could sense the trail at last. Glorp simply could no longer reach it alone.