When they were both appointed up the massive mare of the Golden Bow – The Sorcerer clinging unsteadily to the youth's back – they set out towards whatever city, or prison it was that had something to do with those... lost.

They could at least lie and say they weren't, he thought, lost – that was; if it was an arbitrary prison, for some weird ideological reason, for those who were. – Though he felt an immediate and profound aversion to lies, but anyway – they had no other readily appreciable alternative on the horizon; perhaps they could find out why they were both lost, even in terms of their personal identities or who they were. There was also the chance, the Sorcerer thought, that he lived nearby; that someone knew him. Or if he was lucky whatever mystical chemicals he had consumed would wear off.

The generic Shensh countryside processed past them.

“And yourself, youth? Did you wake up in a bush? From my limited experience of life I'm obliged to extrapolate that this is a serious, frequent, and present danger.”

The youth laughed at him, presuming he was joking, or pretending, or something, “In my case no, nothing so benign I...” he trailed off, “I woke up on Setty here at pace, being chased – I looked behind me, out of a transition of some kind; I clearly hadn't been there but had been somewhere else. And for the life of me I cannot remember where; why; what – how –”

“Mystical chemicals, I'm bound to –”

“I'm not sure but unfortunately, they were on horse back, a phalanx of what were unambiguously demons, but on horses – I could tell because of the strange organs hanging out of their – more than ambulatory, they were riding horses – corpse materials, that constituted their bodies, you know, they were swinging clubs also. Other weird weapons, one of them had a bow, but I looked back and – the bow was in my hand and I was loosing, before I knew, and in fact that was the first snatch of language across my mind, I've never spoken, at this length, clearly I'm able to – you understand me. But it was: the Golden Bow; this was it. And immediately also I knew that this wasn't merely the name of the bow, which I wielded and with which I quickly despatched individually the phalanx of the undead chasing me, it was the name of... me. To sum it up. It was me.”

They rode in silence.

“This is strange, isn't?”

“Yes, it is.”

Shensh, the road, trees, crooks, rock formations, a few ruins on the distance; it was like it was – it was merely images passing across them. The Sorcerer noticed that he didn't really do any of the riding, that was, the youth – he noted that Setty, his mare; it was really her doing it; also that the weight of an extra body didn't seem to upset her overly. Or indeed at all. She didn't seem to tire one bit.

“And you,” the youth broke the silence of their daydreaming through that countryside in images that merely processed past them, “any notion who you are? The chemical haze, if it's that, lifted?”