“Everything beside the temples and chambers of the Old Dark Weird Religion? You haven't - ?”

“I will tell you a story; but first; yes – and that's not even that - it's still all down on plane 88.” She stopped, looked up at him, straight in the eye in fact, imparting something that – she was always – perhaps the most - mysterious to him; despite the other mysteries it was his job at times to instantiate in reality in order that a dangerous narrative superstructure remain on its feet. Despite the direct access he, via his talent and all like him, had to the fundamental stuff out of which, out of which, mind, consciousness, material, everything, everything, really everything was created - despite his life head-first in mystery, her:

Tenns. It was her he couldn't figure.

- “You'll tell me a story? But where are you taking me?”

Another mystery; she was saying nothing - she just had that look.

“Whatever it is. You'll see it.”

They branched down an alley that followed the contorted routes of archaic Sack Town. Where sometimes even walking around required strange means of seeing/twisted around in circles, between strange angles, that really had no reason; no reason - not for existing; twisting the passages inside him, feeling himself, in this way, re-initiated into whatever it meant to be. And also a member of his/this species/race.

“Here.”

- “What happens? It's a shadow? What happens at the end of the ceremonies – that which/what - causes these spontaneous eruptions of mountains of blood?”

She stopped. Wooden door. He knew this place, he didn't - a flash of something interior that for a moment he wished to glance out of, him, but -

She bent beneath an archway and opened the door, following another corridor, another room, a strange space: details of the religious eye-guards that were used by their priests, directly carved into the walls, a kind of bas-relief, but it was just repetitions; another room like it, depicting some other kind of religious implement he didn't even recognise and then.

A classroom.

Children.

A burst of life and laughter - passing through this too. She waved, and joked, and called names, and the children were bursting with a kind of manic humour that – Pry could tell; they were manufacturing. It was not real; it, unfortunately, was not real in the slightest.

A further Cyclops woman, tall, middle-aged, severe, maybe, but beautiful like the rest - even she was trying in some fashion to cheer them; this the children recognised and responded to, it was their duty. But they didn't mean it; the laughter was fake.

Another passage, another room, and then: