Intoxicating noise fills the club. The music’s throbbing beat, glittering with crystalline static and the crowd’s excited shouts and bursts of laughter are obvious, but Fel has never found a way to drown out the oceans of blood pulsing just beneath their skin. Earplugs and thick, insulating headphones help a bit, just like the smelling salts and herbs stuffed inside her mask help with the smell, but it is never enough. Will never be enough. ...
Slipping into the club, music pounding at your ears, in your bones, the thrum of life and song and dance; friends with you for a moment then gone in the kaleidoscope whirl, torn apart, joining the crowd– And you go with them, lost in light and sound and movement. The noise is inside you, it is you, filling your motions with beautiful Purpose; twirling through the crowd, intersecting and diverging, no partner lasting more than a few moments–that’s not what tonight wants of you. ...
Through the fringes of the world She weaves her charms, smooth silver threads laid across rooftops and knotted umber sewn through sidewalk cracks. Each day brings with it a different color, a different place, all unremarked by the sightless things who think the world theirs. Her web weaves loosely through forgotten places and tightly through those much attended but hardly seen, enmeshed in the set dressing of lives lived without pain. So much remains unseen, unremarked, in those places; so much detail lost beneath comforting security. ...