It was like this, the room:

Pry understood across Massimo's consciousness, passing a door, whose dimensions were in some sense intangible, an ambiguous region of thought/perhaps transferred consciousness, or maybe it truly was like this. Because the room that Massimo entered, Phinz-Twoan Sly behind, always seeing him, always behind, always there, a great cloak across his consciousness - was formulated out of wind/shadow/the eddies of thought and night. In some material – even - sense.

Complete blackness and night surrounded them, all of them - but that was all that could be interpreted, out of that murky zone, as mysterious as Massimo's consciousness itself.

Faceless.

The shadows that worked the space itself around them, didn't stop at the identity of the personages in there. Anonymous in some deliberate religious sense. Obscured; this was the impression Pry had, even from themselves, from Massimo, he didn't - that consciousness was shielded. But the shadows that surrounded, only this was clear, did not separate the space from their identities.

And that same wind.

It was what surrounded them.

Pry realised the space wasn't vast, it was in fact miniscule. It was in fact compressed into the tightest space that could accommodate all and Massimo, and his Cyclops.

It was just that. The tightest possible allowable space that could accommodate. Where was this? In pure mind.

That could accommodate pure minds.

The smoke, the shadows, the wind.

It was that.

Entity.

That Pry.

The space, that in the first flash of consciousness he had interpreted as perhaps infinitely, quasi-infinitely if such a concept was permissible, obviously not, but almost infinite, he had interpreted – mainly above, but that was wrong. An entirely errant self-mystification. Because the room was almost nothing. That space around them was that thing. Above them. That, perhaps at some point, perhaps for some people - but he couldn't indicate even to himself that it wasn't there. That thing was there.

At first a trickle and then something else, more, consciousness, entered him - more however tightly controlled. Pry - he understood. It was the same time that it started.

Maybe something could be done in the dreamunits of Hortag.

Massimo, glanced out the saintly eye of the Sly behind him, out of that other place - not strictly speaking a part of Old Works: a region not one hundred per cent dissimilar, appeared, he appeared in a place, Massimo appeared:

Hortag, proper, not the Blind City in the tundra, beneath the ground even.

The place was that place from whence he himself, Massimo Diap'leptico Rampposz - what was he trying to say; this was where he had been, if you could call it that, born.

He saw the first part that allowed him to identify the place he actually was. The place of his birth. Hortag whole; everything that wasn't Cyclops; the Blind City, everything else. A one planet state, in that sense not dissimilar to Theust, but -

And he knew that, he was in it, again, because of this:

Maybe something could be done in the dreamunits of Hortag.

This:

That was his plan, if you could call it that. He was a dreamunit of Hortag; this was the reason for this; it wasn't even a forlorn hope. It was merely a feeling. And this phrase, that re-echoed in him, in his mind: he didn't know where it had come from; but it was insistent enough, indeed the phrase lived as an obsession in him so that - he had to; he had to go home because.

He didn't even know what it meant but

Maybe something could be done in the dreamunits of Hortag.

His old neighbourhood, his old place.

Maybe something could be done in the dreamunits of Hortag.

Maybe something could be done in the dreamunits of Hortag.

Maybe something could be done in the dreamunits of Hortag.

Where did they keep them?