This is the second part. The world we walk in is one we see through untraumatized eyes... the one you see without accident, the see something else... more than you bargained for. Once seen, these things can never be unseen. You become a part of the hidden world, its rules, its inhabitants - and their bargains. It'll creep up on you. You might smell spoiled beef from an empty alley, a fingernail scratching a tune on a record in a sealed attic… or catch a sewer manhole sliding noiselessly closed. A grinning smile within the door of a doghouse. A sudden feeling of déjà vu and a faint, distant jazz saxophone when you enter a hotel lobby. Smoke and ash lingering in the air where no fire has burned, and the faint smell of the charnel house may come from a children's playground. Your grandmother in a brief moment of lucidity, recite a poem from the 16th century and tells you the third line will determine your fate, and all the while, the candles in her windows flicker even when there's no breeze to brush by them. Every alley merits a second glance, then a third... but when you turn away, your surroundings have changed. There is splashing in empty fountains, a giggle behind an abandoned storefront, the ting of a glass shard falling... you may even hear the dust motes whispering amongst themselves. Then - it gets worse. When something cuts you deep, physically or emotionally, sometimes you catch a glimpse of the world as it unfolds… walls peel away, tiles fall from floors into the Abyss, and reality becomes a hallucination you happen to have shared with everyone you knew. Distance has no meanings, streets stretch on forever, and things at your peripheral vision suddenly become very, very real. Nothing can be measured, and you see a glimpse of the infinite. Demons lurk in bars, waiting and getting drunk on human misery, as they sip emptiness from glasses of pessimism... and wait for humanity to come in to pick and choose which of those empty vessels they wish to sample and fill with their energy. Mothers forget their children, their houses filled with empty cribs whose contents have been misplaced. Some say there's a dark overlord behind it all, pulling the strings - Lucifer himself, the puppeteer, the one-we-all-answer-to, the fallen angel... but thing is, no one's seen him for some time. It's like he's vanished, gone, into the air... like a folk tale. Where has he gone, you say? Well, that's the part of the story where you walk in - or wake up, might be better. You and this fellow Lucifer, turns out you have a history. A brief one, a cloudy one, but very, very troubling. But that's how all tales begin... the tales worth telling, that is.
