I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,


 dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn

looking for an angry fix


-Ginsberg, Howl

Scarlet, daughter of morning, how far you have fallen.

It speaks to me, even on the London street. It chastises my intelligence, lectures my every thought. The beast isn't one, it is many; 1000 shards of glass in my broken mirror, each piece too small to see one's reflection in. I held up that glass one day and saw a stalking predator—prey was in no short supply—and indulged its hunger when it asked.

The predator betrayed me; the mirror was smashed. Even in dark alleyways under the suffocating fog I breath nothing but stale air. The images are so clear and yet so full of haze and young cough syrup dreams. The mirror smashes in every play-through. I can see myself no longer.

I am a thousand faces; my eyes are red like my namesake, my lips are vivid and plump. I make them that way. The creature(s) inside claw at one another and tell me this is beauty: crimson on white, little cherubim devils. Are they right? The Dame asks no longer. My beauty is in my art alone, and my art is the sewing together of mortal lips and binding of their knees. The Invictus stands still, but I change within it.

The sanity still remains in my mind's eye. I call them by name in my thoughts, but my lips speak other words, and it scares me to know where it grabs such meanings from. The insight of the mad, I was told, would be a gift. But my mind was never built to shatter; I am no Ventrue Lord cackling in his tall industrial tower. I am a savage, and a savage mind broken is nothing but a rabid beast. When will they put me down? I wonder this in my daydreams and beg for torpor. Duty and loyalty and all these strange things I still cling to; it makes me human.

The yawp of my thoughts is disgusting. More than I can process. I never finished high school, I never educated myself on popular culture, or subculture, or math, or science. Yet somehow, the beast(s) know. I hear them like a Legion of nothing whispering of knowledge lost and never to be gained when I chose death and fishnets and claws to life and lemonade and college.

The answers are not here either, where the last mad one told me to go. Instead, I find a plaything, and perhaps breaking her mirror will teach me how to repair my own. London: city of all that is not me. The passage was made safe only by the auspicious dealings I made with New York Haitans through magical doorways and... blah blah blah. How it works doesn't matter. To bring this one back though I'd have to risk a ship.

Chicago's fog smelled better than the mist of this place. It is old and stinks of history and death. The cell would have me back soon if I survived the trip.

First I'd need the clay. My new art. Watercolors and crayons would be set aside until I smelled American soul once more and felt the urban predator's soft footpads against harsh concrete. That next hunt would be so good.

My eyes are green again; my hair is black. I'll be the writer's muse. I'll show her violence and then steal her in the night.

The more violent, the better.



And oh look, a dead Carthian.

The dreams are sometimes true.