The shield pulled back showed a column, that opening, allowed him inside.

A blazing corridor of white.

He had only a vague recollection of any of this, of what was before; of the great and terrible effort; of who he had been. What was his name? His name, his past; all memory; it had been erased. Who he was in the white corridor was who he had always been. This consistency was who he was; this through-line of effort. An unceasing process. He was not a man; let alone a being with a name; even dreams; he was effort at going forward. He felt himself pulling a great thing, behind. This constancy; this being in this space. It was beauty. But it was going; it would soon be gone - every other time it had been gone. Just this; this movement; how could there be anything else, but this? It was a trick that he was conscious of.

He was allowed only this grasping at a final and comprehensive understanding – but only between; only between these columns. The other at the end.

It was something else.

A great task.

A great ending.

But for the first time, to begin -

through the column a field of distortion opened and threw him

- he was - he turned; a basking whiteness thrown around - him – ready. - was – ready; for - a field of opalescence, a palace of planes; confusion; of white angles and diffuse - it was the net around his bed.

It was the rags that kept the flies out.

Something had been lost between waking; between - there was something of desperate and irrevocable importance that he had to remember and this had happened many times; hundreds of times; it could be more. A hundred thousand times. This was that feeling of – but this had happened.

Again and again and again. He fought; head in hands; he strained every atom of his body to seize; he must seize he must keep this moment; it was who he was; beyond even everything else that he had assumed was the only real reason to be alive; this thing – if he forgot now; he would have to die; sweating, his dense, quick muscles his heart, size of an ox's, the/his blood in every passage and artery; the hardest fight of his life was keeping this thing; seizing this item shaped like memory - for if he did not, if again it left him with its final and unquestionable significance of who finally, finally, finally who he really was -

If he forgot this/if he couldn't, but he must, his entire body, his brain, veins popping and muscle-fatigue through his entire anatomy; but he was pulling something, that was not even inside him, it was something else; it was outside; it was a memory shown to him that was irretrievably his; he possessed it. But it was not inside him. And despite everything it did not belong to him. He did not. He was: slave.

And the memory, if it was that, was gone.

And what was worse was that the sense of it having any meaning, any import at all, left with it.

There was a giant, in there, in his room. He took the rough homespun sheets and wiped the sweat off his face. There was a giant in there; its features distorted off its face.

Art[ion] Mlckk'n Inchance-rify, remembered who he was, and laughed.

At the same time he unsheathed his bed mate. In one exaggerated slash his side-sword opened a wound in the fly net and a naked Art[ion] leapt through it.

He said something, the same time taking in not just the present image of what confronted him but a million associations connected to what evidently was the identity of this being on the whicker chair – they made whicker well in Painsch; they had to - in this case; small for his kind, still equal to Art; just as dense in muscle and hard, impenetrable weight – not six and a half foot, but, then again, like Art[ion], not far off it. - He wondered if the one-eyed fellow was as quick.

He'd never fought a Cyclops.

One black eye in the centre of its/his forehead, blinked.

With something like close personal experience, you could say in the first person or second, this was the moment at which Pry-Boak [cL^YoP] took on the totality of the mode - they used to call it this. Pretty obviously there was no coincidence this event occurred concurrent with this first, call it vision, of the hero, full name identified Art[ion] Mlckk'n Inchance-rify. Inchance-rify, by surname. The Prince of the Multicoloured Organs; the Duke of Wanting; the Marquis of Multi-hued Mendacities; Which was the name of a song if he recalled correctly. A normal thought for reasons of an irrational craving for psychological comfort – normal, so called, thoughts were inconceivable; these were also inconceivable, when a being like him, entered the full totality of it/his/the, they called it, mode. The way in which his announcing this quest was connected to – but this was later. This was certainly an interpretation one could ascribe to it, in the terms they certainly in the past used to append to the one that was this Phenom/Annunciator.

And this was exactly why, in this moment, he knew precisely what the giant broken-nosed wheat blonde human – he could breathe plenty through it: that nose – was thinking - with that ear; that ear in that fashion that made him so easily identifiable across, well obviously Shensh; Waat; Hannand. But Hortag. And Theust. But also – well everywhere, obviously, given what he was. But Shensh, Hortag and Theust.

As apparently inconceivable - physically impossible - as any connection between those lands could be.

That ear that was currently... he could see none of those famous swirling eddies of colour... currently transparent. But he was the mysterious one. Him. Pry. Because he had a single eye in the middle of his forehead and was in no accepted sense to anybody a human being.

Maybe he had these thoughts later; if you could call them thoughts. He definitely had them later because - Pry was right, he didn't understand, what they used to call, the mode either. Just that he could read his thoughts, via that connection, and that Art, Art[ion], Art[ion] Mlckk'n Inchance-rify, was thinking pretty specifically about – pretty much solely for reasons of professional curiosity – throwing a side-sword at his face.

At some point he had to try it anyway in this new mode of consciousness. So he blinked.

Emanating from the one-eyed giant; in some sense Art didn't understand - out his eye - but really back and through him; an inference of a corridor/of a vast passage; a complex of chambers that went back and all the way through him.

A terrifying and inarguable connection to everything that was shocking in its absolutely inarguable connection to... reality.