But fading out now - superimposed, in fact, they saw - something else:

New Works.

– it was forming – the replacement for the great, old, evil system that they had all operated in as primary, functional, essential in fact, nodes - without which it couldn't.

They could see it now, by means of their individual talents, and even in some supernatural sense that Pheel could not understand, the connection between them. He saw it all. The corridors themselves now evacuated; the demons leaving through the wounds in swarms - he/they/he/they saw all of them go – saw them all pour through the wounds and leave the great old structure hanging empty, impossibly empty, it had never been empty, definitionally - it had required Cyclops: the means by which they saw reality. But only one corridor at a time; only one region, out one eye - their eye that could see, at a time, only one corridor. One corridor at a time.

But the Wound saw the whole thing contemporaneous.

And that was how it hung there. How it could hang there above them.

- he saw it there even as they were used to destroy it; manipulated here – this was a thought he had to have - too? – each of them so that – he could use them to destroy it.

And Pheel couldn't believe that this concept was even occurring to him. But - he couldn't deny the reality unfolding before him. - All of this to replace that evil old system.

With something worse.

They saw the demons leave the wounds, expecting them to join them here in this great chamber that revealed all of it – this great chamber manufactured out the great throne room of the Queen of Waat, among other places and forced into final reality. This – whatever this place was between, anything that apparently could be agreed existed, they'd expected – perhaps - forbidden knowledge glanced in them among other things in order to manufacture their response to this event/these events/their responses -

whatever was being pulled out of them: their very fucking emotional reactions essential to its even fucking functioning – Pheel/interpreting - though perhaps this idea too had been induced in him, one of these ideas – one of these ideas – but no.

They saw it.

Through the wounds.

They saw where they were going.

They weren't entering the throne room at all, to combine, to rejoin, to worship - because this was what they were really here for - this idea connate, in the glances directed sporadically directly in them/in order to force the ideas in there, necessary for this great change/exchange to happen/it was happening, in anyway whatever.

His eyes were the hands he stuck in the gloves of their souls/their corpses - they weren't coming back at all,

they were going out -

and they were taking the wounds with them.

Art saw Shensh like an aspect of his mind that had become alive/incorporated into the new forms, of a kind of brand new existence.

He saw it form before him in some fashion related that -

He saw it there. He saw what it truly was.

He saw the dream itself which was inextricable from Shensh. He saw this magic place; the only place he'd ever known - he saw it form before him – through his mind.

And he saw the dream. He saw the dream through himself; he saw that it only existed through himself. He knew things now that he should never have known. Like what kind of entity he was - with what kind of – talent, they'd call it, Pheel - and even Pry and Massimo, they'd agree.

But what kind of talent really was it that he had – to be a being inextricable from the place that birthed him - if he hadn't birthed it – if he wasn't - a notion he couldn't untangle. The life of one was impossible without the other, that and the dream. This was the three-tier, individual reality of Shensh, even separated out from Old Works... even separated out from Old Works, which was in fact the process that he was witnessing.

What was this place...?

And the wounds -

The demons brought the wounds with them. He saw Shensh in flashes across the total image at the same time that showed the planet, nations, that showed them in the form of maps alive;

villages - no processed images, nothing sequential all simultaneous/played through his mind, perhaps even out of him.

The Wound itself/himself stared directly into his eyes. Through him he stared those wounds in to Shensh. And as he did those images soared of him - through - of the wounds flowering across the planet, in himself, he felt, Shensh – his home; his world, his body – he felt what those eyes poured in him.

He was living what those demons out of Old Works - former Cyclops and more beside, pulled into Shensh. - He felt the series of transplantations. He saw them pull the wounds – the ruination of existence induced in Old Works at the Wound's behest – pulled; he saw it all, he saw each individual country, each individual town, the same thing, each village, and nation. And all of it simultaneously in the form of living maps:

In each nation from above, and each village from inside, he saw the wounds pour/torn from the very structure of final reality itself. He saw those wounds, and he saw what poured out of them.

Demons.