Pain was the wrong word for what Alex was experiencing.
Pain was something the mind could locate and name and build a wall around, something that had edges and therefore had limits, something that sheer will or simple persistence could be pressed against and hold.
What moved through him now had none of those qualities. It was painful the way an ocean was water, technically accurate and completely insufficient as a description of the scale involved.
His body was in miserable agony, yes. Every part of it cycling through states that flesh was not designed to occupy, unmade and remade in patterns that grew more elaborate with each pass, the wrongness of it accumulating rather than dissipating, so that what was real and solid and genuinely his became harder to locate beneath the layers of mutilation that kept being applied and changed.
His mind was suffering the same fate, only worse.
