No answer to that one. They kept walking in the dark. Then.

A red slide instantiated itself further into his consciousness, in those terms - not merely the appearance of an object, but planes and abstract layers; building upon themselves, to form a great red side of a wall; side of a side, a side of a whale, a rib. - But these were merely metaphors, not literal in the same instance of the terrible red flashing before him, that they had to traverse in a passage toward - an inverted rib or tunnel, that he didn't understand and couldn't. But Pry kept - walking, barely conscious, in a dream, worked by Tenns, he felt, in relationship to this new concept - new religion? - This force towards, anyway, which they were being passaged. - If this -

“But the priests -”

“Showmen -”

“Showing me something in the dark.”

“Underground.”

“It's beneath us.”

“Plane 88 in the dark, and this, this is it; this takes us there, indefinitely, this thing - in a fashion beside the literal by means of reality – that/what - that's what - it's going to show me: truth?”

“You are – but you say this -”

“You're already doing it -”

“Yes.”

“Whatever it is that -”

“In the dark.”

“Touch the slide and passage -” She pushed him - again -

They fell.

Vertigo. Speed. Passage. His anatomy, and her beside; he felt her presence, clicked, buckled, attached, mechanically and the same time biologically into this rib-slide side - wall panel object, biological/mechanical, not in equal parts, not even conjoined but merely impressions, merely separate and contradictory impressions that – because this thing, everything else had been real; literal, this was, but no. It was a side of a rib of a passage that plunged him inwards and much further, much further down.

He wasn't inside himself was he?

Passaged inward and down.

Not -

They fell - and Pry thought his own ribs would break. He saw the flashing images and colours of a transformation injected in his cells: colour that was pure transferred knowledge at a speed he felt burning him; he was burnt, burnt, burnt/flames burning his flesh, his skin bursting in fire and he'd die, and the terrible heat in the colours of transferred knowledge he bucked - trapped, in the rib, beside it: the shell, the passage and faster his flesh ripping/erupting flame; he'd die in one final flash, in a puff of fire, his smoking flesh exploding he'd -

extinguished only by the breathless plane of death.

Pry died and bucked beside, he felt -

Fleshfire.

Destroy him.

Together they passed through a region that extinguished the flames that – he was alive, he couldn't touch himself/verify the current existence of, or damage to his flesh - whether his skin had been mostly consumed in - but there was no pain, and the burning was purely –

he felt it no more, anyway, he felt, and no pain - no damage, solely by -

They fell again, 88 planes down beneath the Blind City, to its bedrock. Literally going down, whatever the overlap with the rest of it, what was – but real? - he didn't think in these terms, real was what he saw, out his eyes, but this passage through him/forced through him - outside him, not inward projected it was -

Outward projected in.

Even his thoughts were.

Even his thoughts, this vast feeling of a kind of connection connected to his talent that could impose realities on – but these thoughts were disjointed, hardly made /sense, grasping for a kind of truth through confusion, transmitted to the others too and Massimo? He was transmitting, this new...thing. This new thing that -

The Old Dark Weird Religion.

Revolved – his body torn, his body screamed, there was no way to explain it even to himself or why he sought to – had to be communicated was the point/the desperate point that he pointed at himself so – he pushed/it pushed him, he was pushing, they were pushing - Tenns and Pry, beside, they

And it ripped it/them off them.

Tenns/Pry-Boak [cL^YoP] stood staring at what they stared at.

Plane 88.

The Old Dark Weird Religion. Inside. They were inside.

“It's here,” she was saying, leading him to another place; it opened, before them, this:

A palace, inverted, painted/tiled/projected on the walls; towers splayed/flattened across a vast square chamber. The space was completely open beside columns at intervals; only the floor and the backwards inside-out palace whose exterior was the interior that they were inside.

Weird and dark, beside, but beneath it all, an atmosphere of... terror.

Between the columns something vast and uncharacterisable, circled them.

An entity? Life itself or a lie of it. - A conception that lived invisibly between - columns? An idea down here in the dark. He hadn't had it explained to him, yet it existed. Here. As a conscious thing that in some sense beyond others he was inside. - It operated between them in a wind, circling, between the columns: precise geometric intervals - for the reason that these numbers beneath reality, precisely understood and reproduced in terms physical by -

Except.

Except for Tenns, and others like her. It was just obvious that this was the reality he was inside; and he wasn't anything, no impulse to - he didn't know what he was or even if he could.

Yet -

“What do we worship down here,” he whispered, bigger than her, a question that terrified. But that was implicit in everything.

She traced him around the columns. He followed her in strict patterns; he, of course, did not/could not understand.

But he followed her, and the more he did, the stronger the vast presence became; the more irrefutable, terrifying, and inarguably real. It was there. The wind that circled them at greater speed and with greater existence.