Better watch out, they'll ask for a word, right? But the word's not a word. It's one of their words, man. If our words are circles, theirs are bubbles
— Jack Frost
I worship a god with an elephant head!
— King Mob
Furies of the guillotine. Les Tricoteuses. Scissors click of knitting needles as the tireless blades fall and fall again and blood atomizes in glassy winter sunshine. These are the women who cry the loudest at the tribunes, howling for vengance, for more blood, for more and more executions. Razor hags of the Republic. It is 1793, the first year of the Terror. Wooden needles shuttle and lock and shuttle and lock, knitting together the red threads of history. Look! A secret pattern emerges! And in the absence of the old Gods, new prayers are offered up to the new patrons of Revolution. "Saint Guillotine, protectress of patriots, pray for us." "Saint Guillotine, terror of the aristocrats, protect us." Kindly machine, have pity on us. Admirable machine, have pity on us". "Saint Guillotine, deliver us from our enemies."
— Narrator
Our sentence is up.
— Jack Frost
Do you know who I am Orlando? I am Ometeotl, double God of the thirteenth heaven. Grandmother of the Gods. Tezcatlipoca, the smoking mirror. Tlaloc, God of raining. Chalchiuhtlicue of the jade skirt. Xiuhtecuhtli, the turquoise lord. Tlazoteotl, eater of excrement, filth Godess. [...] And Mictlantecuhtli, the dead land Lord in the place of weeping, the place of the unfleshed. You've strayed far from home little Orlando, little unfinished one. You don't belong here, in the world of the fourth sun. You have stolen the name of Xipe Totec. The lords are not pleased.
My patron is the voodoo loa Papa Ghede. Death is his meat and drink. And he neves goes home with an empty belly.
— Jim Crow
Do you ever dream in more than three dimensions?
— The Blind Chessman
And here, in 2005, it's seven years to the end of history. I'm not afraid of death. If it happens, it happens. For all I know, I might never die. I just want to know. I want to be invisible. [...] I'm writing a book, I'm floating in a warm ocean of living words. And where Mozart walked through an architecture of notes, I'm spinning down fumes and pipes and chutes made of flowing language. With my typical presumption (Kerry calls it) I've decided just to use the title "The Invisibles", because it seems right. It seems like it's mine. And if I write hard enough and honestly enough, I think I can make it real.
— Ragged Robin
It appears that some brave young perverts are working with the "slick" alien material which accompanies negative contacts with "the other side". It brings illness and fevers and they call it "Feeding the beast". The volunteers live in a house called "The Semi". Panning for gold in the archetypal dung of the human consciousness, slowly assembling the maps of Hell to guide the rest of us safely through the dark. Mr. Reddy, my renowed tantric teacher, had a name for this process, which I couldn't spell then and I certainly shan't attempt now.
— Eddith Manning
