“Look at me.”

Pheel Cazzo, with effort, lifted his head off his desk, and observed – also for a minute the two Cyclops in the corners, the ancient, and the younger one: why the room was only black panels. He'd have liked something more ornate personally but – Old Works - any sort of a basic space was sufficient given current resources; all of which thoughts were intentional distractions from observing the person whom he'd been directed to.

Beauty could be cruel and hurtful, often times. - He'd often thought there was nothing more painful than beauty. Nothing more spitefully cruel, nothing so pointedly and directly agonising as beauty. Nothing that hurt so - nothing that boiled his flesh like a beautiful... like a flush cheek; like her flush cheeks. Like the specific – those angles of her face... looking at her face was enough to kill a man. To make his body and mind dead, permanently... which was not an eventuality he'd - he had access to certain information revealing that eventuality was an extremely unlikely one.

Death was a concept, men like him, had propounded for reasons of moving stories along, he thought; they'd dealt more in ideas, in the old days, but still, in all, that - but her face.

Maybe Clua-Sryh's face could kill a man. Maybe if one thing could do that permanently, skipping that single instant of eternal agony or bliss, in that space he even had a certain understanding of, even the location of, but... his mind raced from him... handy at this stage of proceedings: that it was already, if even unpleasantly, racing. There were over a thousand ideas required of, specifically him, in a matter of days, preferably last week, or the walls themselves - but obviously who cared: the three worlds that they connected... there was more than all commerce; intellectual and financial and commercial/logistical and spiritual and religious and thaumaturgical, and... demonic... at stake - if he didn't hatch about a thousand ideas in two minutes with resources seriously depleted but... no... - no-way anyway, he was being slowly killed by that face.

Clua-Sryh turned her statuesque, elegant frame to face the younger of the two Cyclops in the right corner behind him, giving him the respite he required in this minute to function a little bit better, to pull himself mentally out of a kind of terminal depression he felt pulling himself inside and then beneath himself; there was an abyss beneath himself.

It wanted his bones; it wanted his flesh, it wanted his soul; it wanted anything permanent. Beneath wanted also the part of him that could live after death; annihilation beneath him; permanent; willing, wanting; and endlessly, with a needlessness that was needful, needing him.

- but She was talking.

Pheel's own weakness offered him no alternative but to face the fact, now, that he had wanted to die. There was no rational explanation otherwise - except; except maybe in terms of, and the idea was vague, except maybe in terms of his own, likely psychotic, faith in – a proxy for something else - his talent.

“And now you're useless; with everything else; you're useless,” Pheel said, choosing to be not perhaps irreproachably diplomatic, but this was unavoidably the true nature of the discourse he was already - inescapably - drowning in.

She'd been speaking – without his being aware of it – and perhaps it was because she was a combination Cyclops – but that was actually equally unfair, despite his own frequent habit, he didn't like to admit this to himself, of treating them like furniture - he respected the Cyclops; the mentality; the stolidness; impermeability. There was also a series of guilty steps that separated him from clearly looking at his feelings regarding them, them too, them as well... but he had to snap himself from interminable internal circumlocutions that only ever were – exhausted distraction – ever -

It was because of his talent. He had not in any sense wanted to die.

He could say this to himself.

“You'll recover, you'll recover, okay? Recover. You currently feel like death is encircling you – you're doomed – malaise - that you've been invaded by the end of existence – entirely normal. You survived something, one in a million... men. They even... just say that; it's planets full. There's perhaps no other male being alive that could have survived that. And you did. And I have no choice but to want that thing – indeed, to need it.” If he could understand what had been behind that eye... “You see how I am. But -”

Head off the desk again he lit across her eyes – her face - which was a grievous error.