it’s been said they deal in arms, or drugs, or pelts of silver foxes. this is false. they simply, sometimes, build the boxes.
some think they are lawyers, or a corporation—sinister, and soulless, and spidered through the network of known nations. this is wrong. they are few, and not at all so far between, and though they sometimes take the stage, they do not set the scene.
when i began i was told, by one who knew them of old: sometimes, they’ve been achingly, quakingly kind—don’t believe a word of it if someone says they’re menace without mind.
you see here the similar, the repetition: they are sometimes. this is their quality and condition, their quintessence, the key to their c[o]urses and crimes. the occasional are occulted from the insights of a world their indifference has insulted—but they’ve learned to take authority and advantage of our prosaic persistence, desisted from the drifting-through that once set them at a distance, taken on an interest in our little lives. there are even rumors they’ve partaken, for a time, of wise and willing wives.
they’re not the first to brush against our pale; they are the first to stay, the first to leave a trail to trace back to their roots, a route that leads Away. but perhaps their greatest threat is this: where they’ve been met, or marked, they’ve consistently claimed one conscious contention, and named themselves with insistence and intention.
these ones, we’ve seen, are no motes of mantic mindstuff, no merely ecstatic scantlings. they are threaded, and thoughtful, and thorough. they are Attic Mantling, and so far, they’ve been simple with their samples of suddenness and suggestion and sorrow—but that’s no guarantee, for you or for me, should they chance to try out tragedy tomorrow.