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I felt the eyes of a hunter fall upon me. A woman’s voice
filled with poison and honey floated into the room. “I’ve
been eager to see you again, Vincent. You’ve no idea how
often we’ve crossed paths, or how many times I’ve dreamed
of you. The end of the Game is drawing near, pulling us
together. Our place in the sky is practically assured. And yet,
I wonder if you’re as ready as you should be.”
Steel glinted in the darkness, grinning and gliding toward
me. My sister smiled back. Sparks exploded over countless
corpses, hissing where they fell into pools of cold blood.
Our blades unlocked, pinwheeling light throwing shadows
across the dead. She quickly receded into the darkness,
accepting its embrace. She knew the night as completely as
I did—she was gone in an instant. The air tugged at me from
her swift departure. Yet I could still hear her, laughing like
the distant sea.
When I turned back toward the bodies, they had vanished
along with the woman I took to be their maker. Not even a
drop of blood remarked upon their previous and substantial
numbers. The echoes playing about the now empty room
only recalled the sounds of my brazen entrance. Had the
woman and her victims all been hallucinated? Was this a
residual madness, grown fat and potent upon a steady diet
of raw sanity? I couldn’t say anything for sure, which was of
course as it should have been.
While it was my calling to outline with my every action
the scope of lost dreams, I had become no small scholar of
madness along my way. This fact was owed in equal measure
to insanity’s kinship with dreams, and my own occasional
flirtations with lunacy. Madness was, by its very nature, many
different things. Or perhaps, more precisely—it was a thing
of many means, all of which eventually arrived at the same
conclusion. Madness was a dream that had yet to realize it
was dead, and so continued to struggle long after waking. Its
war was with windmills, its weapons hawks and handsaws.
It was the ghost of art, a freedom recognizable only by its
302 | Mark Anzalone