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

A swivel round his back and a leap to the side, one dead arm hanging wild, he barely had enough in him to counter and counter again, and roll when a misinterpreted rock threw him over, ironically playing to his advantage, up again around the back of the giant – something in his face invisible; defied interpretation – his face was...

he couldn't contemplate faces or other appendages, a whirr, as much as the implemented limbs flying at him - a poignard in the giant's left, a weird dancing pattern of axe and blade and his reach was superior despite the size of the thing - but that hardly made the difference with the speed with which the giant in rags, and blurred face, roped his tossing weapons around any counter: an entirely different conception of combat – his, a culture, unencountered -

a completely different system of interpretation lay – of reality - beneath it; everything. intrinsic in the movements themselves, barely conscious; barely conscious of anything, but - there.

Laying dead he - had to once more succumb to it, that which he hoped to never again; but the Glove of Cleasz - as it had been so often - was his only escape from death; a death moments earlier he thought he'd warranted; thought he desired.

The jewelled carbuncles at the tips of the iron gloved fingers responded, but without being able to direct their reaching, into the field of error, that the malign entity, that he'd finally despatched, had crafted in connection to –

An effort from which he'd never recover – undirected, Rec felt it reach beneath him; no other choice, hanging there – his arm and the Glove of Cleasz attached – limp, in the fashion it was. Directing its pulling with a shard of his under-conscience – no choice - as he parried those brittle blows that were more than his ancient bones could suffer in terms of where he was – he could think about - in these sidereal cycles concurrently manifested.

Beneath; beneath; beneath; he felt its pulling; he felt the wicked strains of that field of horror below him that was his doom and his only recourse.

There was no way in which he could direct that reaching, limp as his arm was. His only hope/desperate wish that the creatures beneath, inevitably, drunk on evil, were sober enough to transact; in a manner – if not logical, then at least comprehensible.

Another slinging clash at his axe, and there were eyes suddenly in the distortions of the giant's visage; distortions in that visage of the being, three heads and three heads larger than him, revealing -

What?

He pulled.

The turquoise planet retreated; beneath he perceived spheres of evil with a cold rationality that was in this moment the best he could hope for. He would pay in future joy, and more, for this effort, but what they desired he apparently still had to give. There was some left. Maybe this was the snatch beneath that would take the vague conception from him, that a woman was a life and that this small part left of him - this time they'd take it, and whatever remained of his humanity after, would, by definition, be all that was left for her.

Land and a woman. He wouldn't lie, to himself maybe, it was anything more than that.

Black spheres warped the turquoise veil around them, throwing shadows in colours over the deliberately weird landscape; the giant paused, cast around, Rec swung.

Rupturing the earth like it was solely an image, Rec leapt back over himself with whatever energy he had left him; expecting only the spheres consuming the giant and then passing back through him, leaving him more inexpressibly soulless than ever. At least for a day or two until he recovered anything like joy, or an understanding of reality that was anything other than an image tinged with misery, when/then -

Evidently he had never been -

There was nothing.

The turquoise forest and two black spheres, confused in their terrible intelligence, circling in expectation of something to kill for him, passed back through him, desultorily taking only a measure of what a full transaction would have permitted - anything.

Nothing there.

Just the distorted branches of what used to be men; that same turquoise light over everything and -

In exactly the same fashion, as if there was a turning in his understanding, rather than anything outside his head; one of these stunted trees, in the quality of that interlacing geometric trail between – it was a tree, and then it was not, it was that giant again - that in reality was no taller than him. A giant the same height as -

he was -

No, in fact - shorter.

He thought to call, but there was nothing in his throat to shout with.

The Prince of Vist was this quest that he had completed; he was completed; he was; he was finished.

What was this - he was inventing images, stories, out of this sick forest in order, solely, in the most basic terms; to have a reason to live?

He couldn't even summon enough - to pity himself for this.

A woman and a plot of land. He was a prince!

Of a country all agreed had never even existed.

Thrown across his vision was that interlacing he had interpreted between the trees, and even categorised, as a sort of imposed maze - out of his desire to construct a pathway toward a reality that still had need of his continued existence; a prince that was a quest, that in its completion, had rendered all knowledge of its ever having existed... without existence, in fact; merely a dangerous fantasy –

It was back and it was back, it had never left, and so was the turning in his perception that showed him there was a giant before him, and as that giant, same height – he was mad now, attaching meaning to misconceptions, grasping anything so as not to face the inescapable; he had mistakenly continued to live after his death

– a turning in his perception of that place that -

And the forest left, and all that was left was that colour, it had never been across/upon that forest, on top of anything; it had left, the forest, but the colour, and the interlacing, and the veil.

And the giant.

And a lattice fell; there was only the turquoise planes that he had thought were refractions out of the somehow always artificial forest; a new way to view it - but this: revealed to have been a misconception all along, the same instant the forest had left him.

The lattices that had descended forming a maze, these could be traversed. The distortions that were the giant's face at the centre of all this, they turned to face him -

without his body turning with it.

A beckoning in this.

He moved forward.

The giant at the centre of the maze.

He was the giant moving toward the giant at the centre of the stage; traversing lattices of pure and only colour. A new quest: meet the giant at the centre of the maze; a place made only from colour. Of the abstract conception of colour. A single colour. This time turquoise. He knew who he was, but less as he approached.

Pulling his own consciousness out of that of the giant's, only through mental effort. Leaving portions and segments with every removal.

Sometimes he saw through the giant's eyes. Sometimes his own. Sometimes he knew he was the giant. Sometimes he didn't; know, that was, who he was anymore. This increased.

Something; He had to do something; he turned. Followed a path made from only the suggestion of colour out of a lattice that was absence; its only purpose to distinguish pathways through colour to the centre of a maze that contained a giant: already him anyway.

Hiding something consciously from himself when he knew that he was him.

He turned, left - if that was a real thing. A dead end. He went back the way he'd arrived: a vague conception of routes he could try for; dissolving upon every re-entry.

What did he have at the centre of the maze.

He had an object of obscene and glorious power.

It had warped his face out so/so glorious in its obscenity that its warping his entire face out of any existence was only the just recompense for possessing.

Back left; he'd been this way. There was something else. Someone. Who was he? Did he exist. - Who was the giant?

It was him. What did he have?

He could shield it.

Pulled back.