The Eye of Mnemaat The cessation of pain was all the luxury in the universe. Deilcrit sought it. And in the blackness behind closed lids, he found that the pain had an ebb, and a flow, and holding his breath through the dizzying combers of agony, he found comfort in the receding of sensation that followed every torturous thrill which racked him. In those moments, he exhaled, and each exhalation brought him a whisper of consciousness more. He extracted his body’s assessment of its condition from the red-gold nausea that hung like an undulant curtain between him and his selfness: he was alive, and he hurt. The contours of his wound were for a time his total being; his reality a depth and breadth of scourged flesh, of scratched bone and severed nerve. The jagged hole was a mountain range in which he wandered like some zealous surveyor whose stomach lurched each time he raised his eyes and regarded the vastness of this valley torn from his muscles’ contours. Eventually, as one in mourning overlong, he recollected his identity, his name, his position in time and space, and how he had come to the pain.
