"Their Faces are Your Faces"

#0095. Ghastly remainders of what has come before. You are unable to escape the things that precede you. They are unavoidable. They are obstacle born. Looming up. Growing from the cellar of you like weeds. Those faces have all lived your life before you. They slipped on your skin and paraded through history. Their faces are your faces. You look into mirrors and see her. God is watching you watching her watching you. The second world is the secret place. You glimpse it and it will take you with it as it dissolves into the aether. It all goes away.

"Angel"

#0096. Their first message is always a command to curb your fear and horror. Because at their core, they are horrors themselves. Timeless and unknowable, limbs of the everlasting God. They descend from realms you cannot touch or perceive. You give them wings. You give them a halo. They are eternal, but so dependent upon your belief. You have such authority over them. They are soulless automatons. Even when they rebel it's part of her her script. But still, wouldn't you hate to see them go?

"In Desperate Need of a Narrator"

#0097. Is there a story here? Can you read it in the lights that blur out on rainy nights? I feel like there is some sort of magic in all of it. A stillness that replicates the second world. The secret place is full of those things. Ciphers written in light. Ancient texts that are spilled out in obscured luminescence. Music floating down in raindrops, quivering and distorting what was solid and bright under sunlight. If there is a story here, we are nearing the first chapter's end. The prisoner is lost in these lights. Alice is watching him. Athena is lush and gorgeous. The angels may leave us all to die. And Itchy will search hell and back for the answers he seeks.

"The Idol of the Bees"

#0098. The Idol is great, but greater still are the other actors, the other cosmic agents who file their dossiers and reports amongst the cabinets and libraries of the secret place. But the Idol of the Bees is still majestic. He gives form to the hives and collects the intellects of a thousand million fragile little pieces. Your majesty, they say to him, and he bows and they bow and they dance together. He scatters them to the wind. They are like fairy dust to him. They collect nectar and they spit honey and they worship at his altar. He has no real equal. He is as scared and as alone as anyone else is.

"Frozen Charlotte"

#0099. Charlotte, once, held the temple of Athena. She built it from broken shears, and Jupiter's tears, and lucid dreams, and Lucifer herself. She cobbled it together from telephone wires and bits of broken asphalt and keys and secret drunkenness and guilt and worry and shame. And one day, after years of occupancy, she just walked out one day. She sailed away with a gentleman and her boat crested the horizon. Did she dip beneath the icy waters? Athena blows out a candle on the Moon in memory of poor Frozen Charlotte.

"The First Secret Name of God"

#0100. The stained glass bookends of a life lived in cathedrals falls and it shatters open and from it spill the first of twenty one secrets. All of it spills out like blood from the stained glass bookends. They leak and flounder on the tile floor of the church basement. Hidden in the various forbidden closets and stairwells. Near the belfry and the frayed rope that sounds the alarm. In that library, you will find all twenty one secrets. Twenty one names of God. The first name, we have seen it so much of course, is Alice. Alice. Alice. Alice.

"Against the World"

#0101. Her eyes show you how valueless and empty the vessel is. Grotesque. The rancid population rises from their filthy beds to wallow in their clutter and base libertine revelries. They march and they cavort. They raise glasses and they sway to music. I hate them. I hate their joy. She sees them for what they are. Perverts and imbeciles. Worthless droning cattle. She and I loathe them together. Us against the world. That's all I want.