...The telepathic nexus hummed with a thousand thoughts that were not quite thoughts, impressions that approached meaning without quite arriving at it. The cultists sat in their circle, connected by threads of will that were not their own, and they began to dissolve. Not painfully. Ilsensine was not cruel. It simply consumed them as it consumed everything, their individual consciousness spread across the vast network of its being, their thoughts becoming part of the Great Brain's endless processing.

One of them recognized the instant of his own dissolution and wanted to call out, but he no longer had a mouth. He no longer had a self to call out. He was beginning to become we, and the vastness of that plural was swallowing the singular he had been. It was not death. It was transformation so complete that the distinction between the two had become meaningless. And somewhere, far away, Ilsensine's attention turned toward the next city, the next thousand minds to fold into its eternal expansion...