was one of Seph's haunts, and was itself haunted by many others, not all of which were strictly present in Anthem itself, but rather in one of the Two Other Planes.

It took a pretty stout heart to take the constant flickering of the wires coiled and sagging down from the mesh rafters - elsewhere in Low, the lights maintained a constant, stable glow. Here, the lights would occasionally all flicker out at once, and leave patrons in darkness.

It was only very rarely that this ever happened, but that was uncountably more frequent than in the rest of Low.

Seph had been present for many outages of one-sixths of the wires, and present too for one-fifths, and occasionally one-quarters, which came in the dozens by the year. Three times in the past eight years he had witnessed half the lights blink out. And only once had he felt the darkness.

To be fair, it had only lasted a heartbeat. There had been no warning. Before he even realized that he was surrounded by the darkness, the whole room had lit up, as if with a flash of lightning, which would have been silent if not for the screams that accompanied it like high-pitched, bloodcurdling thunder.

He saw the whole room had lit up - that was the only way he could describe it, even now, though lit up wasn't the appropriate phrase for it, and neither was saw, no more than "light" could be used to describe what Seph "saw" when he closed his eyes, the indescribable non-colors that floated and exploded behind the lids.

He couldn't move. His tendons were being knotted together - he felt it as intensely as if someone were taking the fibers of his muscles and purling them by the millimeter - and even as he watched, his skin began to grow wrinkled and distended, so at first he thought he was aging - and then he realized he was actually melting -

His veins were being yanked out from his heels - he felt the tug of them from their roots in his submissive flesh - he felt them being coiled around a fist of sorts - and he saw it all, only dimly, as he sank, his skull resting on the floorboards - and as he began to pool out beneath himself, he saw that something was being left to him, a thin, sticky film of something on his skeleton, and dimly he realized, "Oh, is that what it looks like then," there was nothing that could be as slimy and clingy as his own grossness, which mostly was colored like the one time he had shoved his friend off the eaves of a seven-story building, or else like his hand reaching for another vial -

He saw a big, big grin - which belonged to something not huge, but frightening, and hungry - desperate, and excited - about to open and close upon something it had coveted for years -

And then the lights had come on.

Seph found himself on the floor. The lights had been out for forty-five seconds. He was one of the two-thirds that had woken up from the darkness; of the remainder, most never saw Low again, and the rest had never been seen by anyone in Low again.

Shakily, Seph had come to his feet, though it took a while for him to remember how to do that - he looked down at his hands and legs, convincing himself, You are mine, and even now he didn't quite have the grasp of his left leg.

A couple months later found him back at Larvae, despite it all. He would take the threat of darkness over being stabbed in one of the other taverns in Low. And Larvae had the best, cheapest drink that could be found anywhere below Tenor Anthem.