AND THEN there were stars, a dizzying sensation of great height without falling, but a spinning, wrenching around in a tight circle.  There was darkness - an everlasting darkness with no beginning, no end and no genuine existence.  There was a loud buzzing in each mind, as though every nerve in each of the seven bodies was vibrant with impulses.  Certainly there was no ordered thought, merely a jumbled mass of emotions without references to explain their sequence.  The greatest of them all was fear, and inside Concuma the hatred transcended even the fear, whipped to boiling point by the shifting of dimensions and mental isolation.

After a timeless interval, the sensation vanished.  And then they were in a different world, all of them.  The bioluminscent entity was left behind, but Swallow carried a part of it with him.  Locked into his own identity was the identity called Sum.

The world into which they came was a world of colors.  Their eyes could not adjust to the splinters and slivers of color which made up the space around them.  There was nothing with which to orient themselves, nothing on which their eyes could focus, nothing to which they could definitely assign solidity.  They saw each other as two-dimensional projections on the crazy mosaic background, frozen into the depthless world, unalive and out of contact.

It was like being hurled into the debris of a ball of shattered distorting mirrors.  It seemed almost as though they were embedded in a great wall of crystalloid, to which their struggling eyes seemed to impart motion.  The facets shifted their orientation, and the whole thing began to rotate, swinging in ever- accelerating pendulum fashion.  They would pick out strange, only half-formed shapes which moved across and through the slashes of color with grotesque clockwork  jerks.  But they could not be real, because they would have been perfectly camouflaged against the patternless background.  As in a kaleidoscope, there were hints of organizaton, but they were transient and more the illusion of the eye than a property of the canopy of colors.

Zea screamed a flat, harsh scream.  It was something for their sensory apparatus to latch on to.  But it was hardly enough.  Only the Blind Worm realized that this was a world of only two dimensions, and that neither their bodies nor their minds were adapted to it.

Toward the black king there came a huge beast, which came ever closer although he could not make out at any one moment where it was or how it moved.  There was nothing behind for him to track its path, nothing on which it moved.  It existed, and it came toward him.  He found that he could move and draw his sword.  He saw the paper-like images of Concuma and Reander draw their weapons, but could not see what they did afterward, because his attention was on the beast.

He tried to run, but the directions he wanted to run in did not exist, and he performed sickening contortions in the single plane which trapped him.

The charging entity separated into four parts, but he could not judge the extent of their separation or the pace at which they approached.  The universe seemed to curve.  Somewhere away from him, Zea screamed again.  Reander writhed, but went nowhere and accomplished nothing.  Swallow had twisted himself into a fetal position.