His physical presence, his internal self... reduced in direct relation - the same time; the same extent; the same way – the tunnel did.

The mouth at the end of it and the trapezoid that had taken him all the way down was not only other than it had been before but, but - he was... and if he took that reflection to its natural end... then he was at his natural end.

Everything was. Finished.

But - everything had been accomplished, everything was now fine. It was over. He had in a manner more than literal saved everything, from something far, far worse than non-existence – joy was a natural response to this. Not unravelling, not his soul unravelling as the tunnel did.

A white trapezoid against the night and the body part at the end of it.

Reducing him directly as he moved toward it.

When he leapt through, still covered in the filth of its destroyed corpse, what then? He should have perhaps thought about it. But succeeding had never been the thing he expected to kill him.

He was sick. He had a fever: the doom of malaise.

A lie.

That unhappy forest was out there. What would it be now? The other half of his life still to live, leaving him as he moved toward it.

He should stop. He should cease.

If he could see his face in the dark, he would see it melt off his bones; his fingers retreating until the hand consumed them. His hand eaten by his arm; his arm: his torso; his torso; the hungriest of the appendages, consuming all the rest.

A heart pumping out on the floor. A dead heart.

What happened when a heart ate itself.

- Doom, not exactly - his habitual response to reality.

It was over. He had saved more than one nation, killing that thing in there and the consequences of what its mind, but even existing, had done to reality.

It was dead.

It was only for him to live now, and to be alive.

There was a... woman, and that meant a life. It was the same.

The white trapezoid ate the night, the same way his torso ate his limbs. That trapezoid was his torso. That night was his limbs.

Nothing was real, felt real, was real, any longer, least of all himself – if he stepped through that, what then? That mouth would consume him. Stop. He couldn't – a revelation – he fought harder than the entity beneath, in the caverns; that – call it the fact that he had no choice but to walk forward, but to move. He was the quest. This was the revelation. And it was himself he had killed.

He ran headlong at the trapezoid gap – the white mouth to eat – he'd leap into death - he'd leap[!] into annihilation. All he could control was the speed.

His soul rebelled at pity:

Doom for eternity.

He leapt.

Face exploded in the dawn; silver face; silver head; silver hair. Rolling despite his length. Field armour black except the dust and gore.

Stunted, miserable births; the trees contorted; the unhappy forest thrown in a light that was everything; over everything. Absolute misery; in that unforest only unhappy as an understatement.

What was the light? Was this nature? Turquoise? Everything cast in it. - Was this the world - even over the unforest; fundamentally unchanged; fine, he didn't expect that; no scholar or theologian had suggested it would go so far as to make that place happy.

And the sadness was in fact still... there – but the turquoise light:

No other colour existed, leaning through the trees that were revealed in that light to be something else even beyond the - something else that he'd thought they really were.

Something in the quality of the light showed him the corridor to take between the stunted births; the contorted branches; indeed it was the only way; that way, by these subtle means, revealed to him.

And then revealed to be impossible; as direct, even, as the route was that was revealed to him in the lucidity of that turquoise veil; it was impossible. - He should have died. He should have died; he saw now in the exact instance of his victory. He had won. He had eradicated the malignant soul of that thing. In its erasure he... should have been.

What he moved through was moral panic.

There was a woman. There was a life.

It is not an easy thing for a man to feel his soul dissolving.

A sudden and strange agony burst inside his iron hand.

The glistening red carbuncles in his nails shot lightning up his elbow that forced the Prince of Vist to his knees.

An interlacing field of angles thrown across the turquoise unforest.

He threw out his supernatural appendage in the habitual gesture of repose; but nothing; the agony intensified; and looking down at it he identified an essential translucence that he had never seen before.

He was being consumed; this was the doom he had interpreted, his very defences being eaten before the rest.

At angles to him, ahead, through the path indicated in the trees: an untree, with personality that -

That personality escaped its body in a sudden revulsion connected to a new quality in the turquoise light; to the extent that it was no longer light, but a giant - sideways – man, in fact, running.

Despite the agony racking him, in one elegant movement, on his feet Rec had the axe off his back, in his left hand, his fighting hand anyway; the Iron Glove of Cleesz was useless to him now; in fact whatever malaise was afflicting it had infected his entire left arm, hanging limp now at his side.

Simultaneously one of the blood-drinking purple crows that haunted this evil landscape elicited in itself the infant screech that so terrified pregnant women and in fact anyone he had noticed who still had retained, here, anything congruous with the supernatural virtue of hope.

This and the giant sideways, and a diagonal rustle by his back.

There was the number twelve in his hand and in his mind now; which was a bad, in fact, terminal, sign.

He turned and his axe met that of the giant's – identical - brother.