Pheel reminded himself he was here to find a chest of prophecies. The Queen of Waat, demonic prophecies, they would have to be, this was simply the nature of it. He remembered, he felt, how much truth had been poured out his soul into this thing that because of various circumstances he was now inside. But if he was fighting evil, and there was evil, this was new too - that there was evil, actual evil and not merely perspective.

He'd poured something so old it was new into Old Works - this time - to try to rescue it. He felt it, it increased; it had been increasing, the whole time, again, so that now something had opened inside him.

Still out the back of his own nut? All of this? He doubted it; desperately doubted that that was possible; true, or in any sense a full representation of what was actually going on.

He went in. Further and further in. He only had his thoughts; only the repetitions, only the themes - his own connection to this space out of which he pulled the quest zones.

He was in the pure space; he was in the final absolute realm of reality that these quests were pulled out of, and he was in it; he was in. - Inside. He'd passed some kind of indiscernible barrier and the increase, the demonic increase, he didn't -

What had been fading, without his recognising this fact, was now gone.

Their faces real flesh; their open staring black eyes; their soft skin; that his hand ran across; their beauty - it was their beauty that upset him. He ran - they responded to his touch. Alive. The front of a door, all faces. Their lips trembled in fear at his presence. Conscious, that was obvious and beaming out them. Each one of them. The faces joined in rows to form the frontispiece of the door.

He touched each of them, starting at the top, caressing cheeks, seeking in touch to transmit comfort, even love. Their fear diminished; these faces were alive.

These women were here:

Rim to rim black eyes open and staring. He thought, perhaps, they couldn't close them – regardless, they were blind. He touched each in turn, and transmitted what he could. Their organs had been baptised.

Immediately this thought was transmitted into him; it was immediately recognisable as not his. He had not formulated the words that made it. It was a sentence whole, that had arrived. The girl whose face he had been caressing, when this thought came to him. Something in her black eyes momentarily that - Their organs had been baptised. He bent lower, following merely what rightness was transmitted through his supernatural organs.

Gently, with great tact and care; with all the gentleness he, a brute, had available him - more than he knew he possessed, Art -

He opened the door.

He kissed her.

He opened the door.

Art was in a room on a bed: iron; straw mattress; floorboards weirdly bent as if something was pushing up from beneath; sword and scabbard in the corner.

Pheel's last revelation had passed him through an invisible wall. Art sleeping, it appeared, on that bed, Pheel reached for the wall and his hand indicated, by touching it, that it wasn't there. He stepped back out the room, backwards, through the wall. It was merely an image, two dimensional, a flat plane, that disappeared, upon touching. He was back in the trapezoid corridor.

The sense of demonic increase, again, there. The transition at first he had not seen, masked by his own thoughts - he thought anyway, was now obvious and entirely visible. Art had already made it to the end of the corridor, and here he was; unconscious anyway, lying on the bed. Pheel hesitated. He looked down at him, touched his shoulder, leant in, and noticed that something terribly, terribly strange was transpiring not just inside Art[ion], Count Art[ion] of the Thing off his Throat, The Dream Slave.

Something deeply strange and indeed unprecedented, was occurring. Just looking at him he saw. This wasn't the weirdest part. The weirdest part:

The Dream Slave was dreaming.

The thing dreamt, himself, paralysed merely by the conception, Pheel saw, himself, in this instant - dreamt. The thing dreamt dreamt. And Pheel had no clue what that catastrophe... could possibly signify.

But this was of course only the first, basic, visible, obvious layer; as complex, as mind-dissolving as it was - for one such as him and... it was the first most obvious layer, merely, of what was occurring here. The thing truly strange, however, and Pheel couldn't help but think sinister, was what was happening to the Dream Slave's face - more precisely, exactly what –

the strange thing was the Dream Slave's face and what his supernatural organs were doing to it.

It was made out of organs.

They'd opened a door.