“I don't know what to do with you.” He was still talking to Pheel. “Pry, go to the Blind Kingdom, see that squalid city. See what you can find out. See what you can stop. - See whom you can save. Find out who is killing Cyclops. We can only continue, we can only keep going. And that is it.” He stopped. He looked up from the heap he'd collapsed into. “It's your initiation; that's the excuse, go immediately, see what you can find out. They are killing Cyclops: dying at the end of the ceremony, their ceremony, their annual ceremony without the completion of which they cannot see. They are killed. As you will be. Inevitably, unless you can find something out... unless you can stop this. Pry. Find out who is killing them, stop this, and that's your part, go right now - see what you can... manage. And good luck to you.”

“Pheel Cazzo.”

Pry had left.

He'd been sitting there, understanding nothing despite finally understanding everything. How many levels, how many layers, how many realities above. Who?

He wasn't even depressed, he felt as if he didn't exist in the first place.

Despite everything being terrible there was a somewhat, weirdly, comforting new understanding between them, as if - as if in fact Massimo Diap'leptico Rampposz had been alone, so long, that even if everything was collapsing into something far worse - at least he had someone to talk to about it. More time passed. One of them:

“You can run this story out the back of your head, in fact it already is, running that way. He's in that cave there, that cave, that subterranean, I'm talking about Art[ion], complex that is simultaneously the innards of the demon that he has to slay for etc... Run it out the back of your head. But I need you to go to Theust, because... I'll hold them off, I''ll – hold, as much of this together as possible; I'll have to fight - at least have to fight, for the story; we have the story. Play the story out, Pheel. Make it the best yet. Make it worth this. Make it worth it. - If this is the last dream anybody will ever… have... make it worth it -”

“But isn't this -

“It's not a good thing – that's obviously... false hope is worse that no hope, because,” he laughed at himself, looked around, looked around at the mad place he'd dreamed, “as always, because it's not real. I'm not going to say there is a... I'm not going to finish any sentence. I can say only. You understanding practically nothing of what is actually happening, of how anything really works, of what it is that is behind – everything, let's say, that exists, and why. And you don't understand it. And if... He... this is what we're in now,” he laughed again, at, the, maybe, pointlessness, of it; maybe at himself for... Pheel didn't understand - which was also explicitly what was being said to him.

“You're not a formula. I'll say that for you - and if that's anything - we'll see if that's anything. You understand how reality actually works, of course; you don't. - This is rhetorical. - As mysterious as it is... it's perhaps not entirely a mystery. That's true and, it's...” he sighed, laughed at himself, perhaps, again, “not,” at the fact that there was no clearer way to explain any of this, “But you should at least know what I do, and for this, there's a philosopher, in Theust – you're going home - same as Pry - you're going home - Go home and -

- “What about my child?”

“That thing is, Pheel; is no child, Cazzo.”

Phinz-Twoan turned his head to - ...and then his eye... followed... - face, him.

that

eye...

saw

Copulating through eighteen umbilical cords - manipulated through

sex that was transport, in a subterranean cave complex the walls of which were the shades of lies that made the demon's mind/throat/mind/throat/mind -

Art[ion] Mlckk'n Inchance-rify,