He glanced back for the fact that the door was now cleared. – The jaw had cracked shut: he must have entered without his registering the transition; while he watched that swirling, eddying, indigo presence in mist; the only source of light. It swirled at the end of the passage, no alternative; he had to move toward it. In.

Standing there. Caked in blood. Sword in hand. At an angle by his side. He watched that swirling eddying thing. He had to go through it. It was implicit in the structure of the place, it was there he was going – through.

He was going.

– though

Implicit in the structure but –

Weird flashing jaws, whistles and shrieks, rough grating laughs; the cacophony was sudden, varied, intimate, and immediately inside him.

The benches were filled with them.

He didn't know what they were – demons.

Hooded momentary snatches of faces – he saw them in hoods, as if his perspective flashed across the room gathering those images and setting them inside him.

He saw a face, and then he didn't – he saw a face that was a deranged sexual wound, and then it wasn't there. He saw a child's mouth sutured onto an ear on the middle of a face –

he saw them.

Hooded; flashing him; flashing his perspective across the place, flashing his mind –

through various intricate, and weird interactions.

What?

The shrieks, the cries, the mad/insane winding tortuous shrieking supposed to be singing, supposed to be music, supposed to be sound; supposed to be oratory. What it was was insanity.

Mad, deranged, cackling and – unsupportable; incomprehensible. It was evil and... insane.

But –

It echoed in that swirling indigo cloud at the end of the corridor. One step toward it.

Unconscious even. He should – he had to –

He'd kill them all.

The sheer walls – fingernails – prevented his – he could not climb and reach those tiered benches, seize the throats of the shrieking, singing, deranged – whatever they were beside demons, in their hooded cloaks, whatever they –

He moved forward as if in a –

He couldn't think here. He couldn't be. The singing. The incantations; he'd seize their throats;

he knew/he knew

what he was – a demon killer; the demon killer; he'd –

It eddied out of that indigo mist at the end of the space; it eddied out of their mouths, it eddied out of his own consciousness; it eddied out of the hatred that assailed him – the annihilation that assailed him; the nothing that assailed – the nothing-love that was pulled out the vacuums that resided in those cloaks: flashing jaws and deranged surgically scarred faces; visages that were merely images wrought on layers, wrought on blood; manufactured faces made that way in order to – derange themselves/him, twist reality into shapes that –

Concepts.

Hate.

Nothing;

the love of nothing and the vacuum assailed him.

Absolute; the absolute, in reverse, waves of it, waves of nothing.