Shinna took my hand and walked me back through the portal. We left all the disasters of that world behind. All that tragedy was in the past. And for a long time, I never looked back. Not until I was too far gone.

Through the portal, Shinna ushered me into a red room that looked like it was made out of guts. The walls were fleshy and bright red. The ceiling was divoted and pocked. The floors gleamed as if they were wet, although when I bent down to touch the ground between my feet, my fingers came up dry.

I followed Shinna through a hall with a high ceiling. We turned a corner. There were stairs. I took hold of the banister, but when I stepped up, the stairs lifted me, so that I didn’t have to move at all.

“Impressive, no?” said Shinna.

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I was indeed impressed.

As we rode up, we passed windows in the fleshy wall. Some of the windows were dirty and hard to see into, but others were clean and big enough to see inside. I saw a fat, naked, animal-like person with a thick, sawed-off horn in the middle of her face whipping a line of black, faceless animals, which were churning oars the size of men in vats the size of tubs.

In another window further up, I saw a dark table inside a yellow-lit room. Skinny men with no muscle or fat were sitting around it. They were discussing some paper in the middle of the table. It might have been a map.

Shinna watched me with amusement. He turned the Tripunctum over in his hand thoughtfully, without saying anything. Then he looked back up to the top of the moving steps. We were nearing the peak, where we would disembark and step into the throne room of Ram Gram Woole the Great.