Follow me.

Before them now, pulling itself into reality in semi-material eddies, of something; perhaps the reality material left over from so many Cyclops, instantiating the separate fragments into something that –

but he could feel so many reasons and possibilities. He felt them all even in the minds of Pheel, Art, his own - that was Pry-Boak [cL^YoP], with his title. But not Massimo. Not yet, and not - yet. But whatever pointless explanation he could feel himself willing himself, maybe with a flash of desperation to force upon it – he didn't. The eddies here, he thought, in the dark, pulling out of those shadows further along that corridor-reality-hall that - he wouldn't have thought it even possible to think about traversing, he saw – and/that they were -

From her?

It was red.

What was this?

“This is the way into plane 88,” she was saying, “The real way, the reality of it. The past, maybe, but not really. It's the truth we've guarded/this religion for millennia - millennia beyond even the numbers we sometimes merely -. This.” Her hair fluttered in that wind not a wind, “recount,” hardly anything that could be described as such, and yet, here, underground – from where - in the dark, almost complete dark, almost. Her hair fluttered.

“The Old, Dark, Weird Religion, to give its fulsomeness. Beneath us, in literal terms, it lives below – and who do you think understands it – who do you think propagates it – who do you think even believes?” Almost spat, “Who believes?” he had nothing - “Us.”

This us, Pry felt, wasn't just those - it didn't even include him, or those who had no hope ever in any fraction - of being incorporated into Old Works. That great corpse –

An image that - why - that they were artificially resurrecting: forcing these stories in there, propping up that corpse with the raw biological energy of dreams; he could feel it. He could feel it in that instant. It was wrong. The thing he'd been taught that he had been made for - was the real reason and purpose of his life, it was wrong.

She hadn't even said that; she'd told him nothing, but Tenns, nonetheless, nevertheless in this constant subconscious confusion - beneath – between - it was communicated.

“We're going below. Keep following; keep walking, keep coming beside - but who?”

Not merely those left behind, not merely women? But this was obvious, would be for the rest/any of the Cyclops with one eye - if you wanted to be bluntly biological about it. Apparently he was in a quest that required that - it was wrong, and, “It's the old dark religion, no?”

“The old, dark, weird religion, in its fulsomeness – do you know what that means? It's fulsomeness. I'm talking about the part that's actually real. And not. That true. And - not merely a lattice upon which is defecated the sculpture of something. Else. It's called Weird. Make no mistake. There is no mistake -”

“- Is it the same?”

No answer to that one. They kept walking in the dark. Then.