– This was all he was; a great walking interior.

– He fought, whoever he was, the only identity left to him, walking across a great interior plain – even as he realised this against his will. He fought not to plunge into this same discourse that inevitably unwound in these words across that mind, in the same fashion that he traversed himself, against that pain that was –

No memory.

No identity.

No self, beside these words, and the [Cyclops behind him] something else, that he couldn't face, think about, respond to, contemplate... or understand.

He worked himself out in relation to the world. – He felt, as a consequence, something inside him that; remained over. Apparently he wasn't merely a blank entity; apparently, something vast, in fact – who he was, remained there.

– Merely that he did not have access to it, only this crazy insatiable, in fact need – not even to try. Not even to ask the question, or list, or plunge into, that inevitable discourse that waited beneath.

He set himself out across a plane that set grids upon it; a maze, in corridor sections; semi-transparent, becoming less and less and then exchanging. Becoming more opaque, operating on him as a kind of field, that pressed him, inwards, in relation even to himself.

Identityless; yes, but stupid; not nothing – not. Blank. It was all inside there.

Pain.

– including, inextricably, from this – who he was; his consciousness and all of his memories/all of the – with no recourse to forgetting or even any chance at it.

If he probed, even if he formulated the question pointedly, even if he allowed that – it could even be described – as a natural desire to awaken in him. But – even if he allowed that thing to give birth in itself or to course – in other words if he stopped fighting even for a second his own natural impulses. And looked inside – he would not be able to separate himself from the notion that this world was even a different thing from inside his mind.

Complete abstraction –

This couldn't be real.

And if he –

Who he was, his identity, his memories; his very self – its removal was the direct consequence of a pain that couldn't be managed, could not even be apprehended in its scale.

His absence, his very non-existence; this was the pain – a direct consequence of that pain; at that – it was insane, and it was the centre of him.

– Even if, this landscape, this place itself, was as much his mind as the words that played across it.

– He didn't.

He didn't know; and thus the cycle, the repetition in ignorance, thus the cycles in self-defeating need-not-to-know – because this world was what his pain was.

Only.

This world was what had happened to him, and unfortunately, even fighting his mind not to know – there could never be any respite; there could never be any resistance. There could never be any release...

from this pain

that was the same thing as knowing/as not knowing, the same thing: his identity; where he was and his mind itself.

He could only be driven mad in increasing cycles! inside this place. – Inside his pain. His ignorance.

– In complete regression, in complete tearing recognition; of the absence, the absolute absence; and pain. – That was the churning centre of him; the fuel that surged him forward in a mania not to be –

And they were on him before he'd even thought that they could be there/seen there – before the thought could even be processed... that was only the prerequisite of their existence.

18, slavering, rotting, blood-stained, head to toe – shedding powders out of their orifices – he saw what they were – they were –

demons;