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equally useful cousin, silence, they’d long accompanied me
on many an excursion. At my beck and call, they provided
me with certain advantages that made me especially good at
my work.
But now, I could sense that they too had emerged from the
Great Darkness altered. Whereas mankind was now broken,
a mad fraction of its former self, darkness and silence were
decidedly . . . more robust. Still hidden from the waking
world, still forces beyond the understanding of the average
person, but more prominent, more alive—more comfortable
in this brand new world.
On balance, the Darkness should have made things better.
But the world persisted as a graveyard, a landscape where
dreams festered for want of realization. Despite the lakes
of bile, the towers of teeth, the underground theatres, and
countless other Obscurra, there was still an incompleteness
to our existence—we woke up, and our lives were made
worse by the fact that we now had some idea of what we
were missing.

12 | Mark Anzalone