Just forward. Just death. Just distraction. Just repetition and ignorance between grids – yes. Yes. Ignorance. He'd know nothing until he did not exist. This was the holy sacrifice he sought. He'd sacrifice his knowing. He'd sacrifice anything that was real. – Not to know. Just let him exist killing/repeating in this realm[!]

that for mystery sold ignorance. Fake mystery in the form of knowing nothing. – He'd take that. Because it wasn't real. Above everything; and maybe this was beneath his consciousness, it was the real that he feared. Because the real was –

“The Demon Queen of Hortag – I'm saying,” The Golden Bow, “This is her first outpost because don't lie to yourself that any of this, anything on this entire planet, is separate from her rule – he's – it has – set up its own little kingdom inside but – and as powerful as he/it – is – and he is, believe me, he is – he retains – interchangeable –it'll throw up/us in mazes of irreality like nothing – like nothing you – I don't know what you've ever encountered – but you haven't.

“Once we're inside there. He'll likely separate us; I don't know – it's an upside down maze tower constructed from deceit and semi-material mendacities ripped out of the structure from which – okay everything; perhaps anyway here, at least in first-tier conception reality – is constructed. Deceit? Demons lie – lies are the foundation – also the hallmark – okay and of-all – evil – and okay we know this. But combine that with the transitional/traditional talent of the Cyclops? Do you know what we'll find in there?”

“No.”

“Me neither; my taciturn... friend – but it's going to be – we'll see the lies shimmer. And... maybe there's no way out.”

They were silent. They moved forward. The Golden Bow, “But it's her. Whatever kingdom of irreality and lies we'll enter in there – however he rules his country – all of it is hers. Remember – if you don't fear memory – he's sworn allegiance to her and these beings work in hierarchies, and – he was baptised in her menstrual, literally baptised in it – instantly and fully submerged. No. Hers. He's – hers. The –”

Do not say her name.

Blood.

“The Demon Queen of Hortag.”

But when he said it – same time – they noticed an incline in that artificial corridor imposed upon the vast Hortagian plane. Rising up a perfect 170 degree angle toward the First – and there was something familiar about that angle, even in a place, like this, even a – corridor – Demon Dungeon of the Descended Grids of Hortag, ruled over by that one Eye set in the gushing disembowelled corpse of the Demon Duke.

A Cyclops operated by a fake-soul that sat in him like an unpassable shit.

“We can't even enter that.”

They looked up. The edifice – now that they were almost at it, it was revealed to be entirely fake and two dimensional, and yet –

“And yet he's in there,” said the youth.

The turning away obviously illusory flat two-dimensional exterior of the dungeon looked like this:

It was a longer-on-the-horizontal rectangle with a square on top. Black against a sky that was revealed to be – not to be one, only compared to this.

It looked like a church: the shape of it. Up that perfect 170 degree angle that – where? That same angle – but where? – that they moved toward.

Upon closer inspection, it had a door.

“This is just a thing to walk through, you know that.”

“I think you're right,” said the youth, “what's really happening – forgive that term – is actually... below.”

Standing in front of the thing. It had an even smaller square atop the top square. – Like it made any difference. Directly in front of it it was obvious you could not even open the door. It was a flat plane. A shape. Merely, they had to walk through – that was all.

But they didn't. They stood there. On that plane between the grids. Looking up at the structure that broke past through the ceiling. It wasn't even there – it was a door/just a flat plane they'd walk through and then they'd be inside, and underground, and... beneath –

In an upside down tower out the Eye of a mad demon Cyclops. Seeing irrealities like motes in the air – disappearing them, perhaps permanently, between them –

“– It's unclear if we'll even be together, in there – if not,” said the Golden Bow – “You kill him and this whole structure vanishes. It is him. Do that. Either of us and –”

“I'll kill him -”

“Okay who's first?”

The King in Grids and Mind stepped through.

Alone.

A flash.

A corridor.

A demon struck him.

And he struck back – quick out slash of the axe swinging through his hands – instantaneous in a fist he cleaved up and behind and the skull of the first demon on him scattered and rolled behind him in the arc of the slash off the axe. It set the chattering-skull spinal cord still attached back behind him – along a long corridor – back – that shouldn't be back – of him – because he'd just walked through –

– No time to even see the place in which he existed – where he was/more on him slashing down out the ceiling; generic self-hacked up; crimson, in barked cunt blood – how did he – know – out

the mysterious demonic vagina

of the infernal Monarch of this planet/he slashed/he rolled/he hit out above him at those climbing the ceilings to launch themselves atop.

Him –

A dark flash out the left wall beside exploded in frieze-dried fragments in the impact of a golden arrow – he was here – even if he couldn't see him; he rolled; got up, too massive to do any of this – avoiding the presence unconsciously behind [that facilitated his movements]: moving axe and shield in the trajectories required to pulverise a rib cage or shatter a collarbone or send a shack of skittery organ parts to a dimension where even fake-souls could not reside.

The King in Grids that Operated Flesh in Repetition was momentarily shield-less: his spare hand spare to seize the neck of a/any rotten fake-soul operated organ sack; glimpsing the Golden Bow hanging back picking off the stragglers from the circle contracting upon him: The King's central presence.

The King in Grids squeezed the neck in his fist until organs gushed out the pathetic low self-esteem fucker.

He wiped brain matter off his gauntlets on the greasy hair of the corpse directly beneath his feet.

Eighteen or – 16, remaining; another scattering a golden arrow mid-leap, and then flying back through the air out its eye socket. He saw, supernaturally, the arrow soar back to the pulsating quiver on the sturdy back of the blonde youth.

Elbow raised in an improvised sports-swing – he dreamed games in his youth, he set a massive swinging arc of axe and shield in cooperation; shield undercutting the legs of the demons slashing and whining at him from arm distance; launching them all in the air taking the axe that cleaved through each of them in concentric circles.

It ripped a circle slash of powder and liquid blood too – not to mention the puss pockets of other liquids that accumulated in the exterior pockets of unhealthy demonic flesh that he'd ruptured – ripping a purple/green/green/yellow sunrise across the walls in organic oils; mapping the walls in all the happy shades of demonic colours.

Five instant arrows picked off the remaining fake-souls bound to flesh and they stood there. Both, bound together, [and the watching presence neither dared mention] apparently, together, in this; certainly alive/victorious in the first mini-battle with a horde of the bloodless and the sick.

They breathed in the new place and mutually observed what it was.

The walls were black, perfect planes; here and there indicating what were only flat lazy indications of rock as if they were in some kind of subterranean cave tunnel region. This was not true. The walls themselves were perfectly flat and in fact the black rocks, indicated there, were only so occasionally and in fact only when one concentrated on observing them: when you stared at a wall you could see those black rocks, the walls between which this tunnel had been hacked, ostensibly, apparently – but the moment you looked elsewhere, these lazy indications of environment themselves disappeared.

The tunnel-corridor was tight – a perfect square, really. An interior cuboid obviously, but each two dimensional slice a perfect square. It was tight upon him. In fact the space itself seemed to be measured against the reach of his axe. As in fact its dimensions were based on this. Because the great swinging arc in a circle he'd just eradicated a bunch of demons with, the range of this ended exactly, almost exactly, at the walls – leaving enough room only for the sides of demons.

The dimensions – necessarily from this – of the corridor were based entirely upon him. It was only one and a half times his height, in fact, so that – [Phinz-Twoan was only a head off the ceiling] – so that's, he didn't know so – that – what?

They were in the middle of it?

Collecting themselves. They had entered upon an... entrance. The corridor behind, and before them, went equally forward, they could neither see what was at the end of it, or the start – if those terms weren't mutually interchangeable. So that, done breathing, The King in Grids and Mind that Operated Flesh in Repetition merely set out forward.

He was followed.

This place reminded him of somewhere else. Somewhere he'd been before – somewhere connected to something he'd rather not face, in fact – so he refused even to think about it. – But why did he think this place merely a repetition – and obviously it was repetition, this was a hallmark of demonology – a parody perhaps of something else – but – evil exists and it is never entirely disconnected from the supernatural –

– where were these thoughts coming from –

– he thought of a planet of perhaps these kinds of doctrines, and anyway that was wrong – he had retained certain ideas, it seemed, he didn't agree with, but anyway that – but this sort of response to reality was not even him – he knew at least or maybe not... it didn't matter.

This place was Cyclops. This place; it was a place of comfort, for a Cyclops, their psychology. How he knew – he obviously did not know. But the thing in charge of this place – it was as if it knew it should construct a subterranean system of tunnels and tight rock passages and the rest – a dungeon underground – but couldn't bring itself to really, in fact.

It only did so when you insisted upon working your attention into the state required to recognise it. But no – it didn't want to; it simply did not want to construct that kind of dungeon for him to ransack, slay demons in – to seek him ever deeper underground into the dark. Light; it couldn't even bring itself to instantiate; anything more than an abstract black corridor – dark, so dark, he could –

The corridors had only been lit by the lamps that were the demons' blood red eyes.

He moved forward, the place lit only by a kind of dimness, seeping out the walls, just enough to indicate, that there were walls. And anyway there was nothing else, the floor was perfectly flat and straight. He didn't have to mind his feet at all, for obstacles, anything; he merely went forward – if any further light was required it would come from the bloody eye sockets of demons making their faces that way easier targets for him to – with an axe – atomise.

Moving forward in that corridor, no interruption, no landmark, nothing different, nothing else, not yet anyway, he asked the Golden Youth a question: Why he had/did – he didn't – know – and in fact instantly regretted it: