Turned around outside a backwards glance, outside Old Works: around at where he was and he leapt – not him, it was/transported, at speed that was impossible unless, his horse leapt a sack of bracken or a bush and a pile of sticks, through trees, two moons through branches in a night in which these separate globes, two, were the only sources of light and the horse,

it leapt -

Calming, calming it now, his hands smooth upon its sides he sought to calm what was the steam coming off its flesh, calming; he calmed, he calmed, he calmed, he calmed, he managed to calm.

He calmed her. Between the dry spines of the only trees out here; so close, in that city bound in with centuries old snow.

A new path. Pry could see. His horse; or was it him, they were walking now; both calm, but much more calm.

He'd been glanced out of Old Works, and he was back; here, Hortag. Near the Blind City; on the horizon, near home.

Shivering, he pulled his coat closer about his neck; he wasn't prepared for this: he'd been glanced right out and apparently he'd spent too much time in Old Works. Not that there had been any alternative. But he was no longer used to the terrible cold. He'd rest up his mare and then gallop home, he did not want to spend hours out here between, but anyway, he could see it, home.

The great sheer cliff of Arfax behind, and the entry: three entry domes; the only way inside. Below, into that vast underground metropolis – only the first floor used in any sense at this point. And only by the women and children for – for reasons of the recent events that he couldn't even momentarily ruminate upon - because apart from the top conscious layer he was hardly even here -

The Blind City. The home of all of them; their entire culture. The home of Cyclops everywhere. Because they anyway only existed in two places. Those two places were the Blind City.

And Old Works.

But he was hardly there; instantiated in this dream of Pheel's. For which reason even here, he was hardly here, he was inside the strands; he was inside each other's [?] minds; completely adhered to each of them.

Following the route up the hill, glancing back momentarily at the hoof prints in the snow; the great steam clouds from his own breath and that of his mare beneath him. But these details were pulled out of thin air, if only to ground himself consciously in the reality of place/this place; to prepare him for what he had to do, but really, his mind dreamt; pulled continually back into dreams; of Pheel, of Art, and something else, he felt... even Massimo.

There was – and this was strange: there was a conscious kindling of a connection, by means of the way in which his species saw/same time imposed: reality, through - it worked in terms of narrative – he was the annunciator - in terms of story/in terms of – Massimo.

Not yet. But he felt a massive identity pulling into that stream beneath the rest; but not yet; he wasn't in his mind in the same way that he read literally the words expressed, the emotions and the worlds that were only – in some sense, in the way he had access to them anyway – projections; minds, their minds, it was in words too. He had every thought, every emotive flash, in both those minds, and his own, so that even now he felt where Art was and he felt the strange world of Theust that he had no wish to comprehend, the Womb Booth, and Pheel - no wish whatever to understand it – he had no choice, the way Pheel did, intimately in terms of the ontology of his soul.

Like those other parts of Hortag, no wish to understand those either; those planes, those terrible planes, empty except for... in that great chain of demented dreams, he had no wish to comprehend. But Pheel - there -

He saw the corridor that Pheel traversed; he saw the Philosopher, those ears; but this was not - and back behind the plants, a mad discourse now, but there was - processing through wings that whipped him forward through – a dreamunit! - but this; layers of tripling back memories/insane worlds of interpretation; vast confusion now too; no, no – Massimo had not sent him, for this, he felt a dawning knowledge of – not conscious, in the - sense - not Art, it was; it was building, he felt, with Art and Pheel, but - he had not sent him for that.