If you want to witness the best and worst of humanity, visit Marrow Street after sunset.

It sounds like staccato steps on the dusty cobblestones lending a beat to thousands of voices as they utter affirmations and lies. In silence, a teenaged girl slips through the throng.

It looks like stained leather and parched cotton decorating the shoulders of tavern patrons, beggars, orphans, fathers, families, thieves, and dreamers as they rub together in a kaleidoscope of browns and grays. Under flaming streetlights that didn’t exist six months ago, the teenaged girl walks unseen.

It smells like sweat and sour ale under the sweltering heat of a summer night, mixing and melding into a pungent undertone that you learn to ignore if you’re lucky. The teenaged girl knows she’s lucky; better than that, she’s already dead.

It tastes like desperation, a bitter cocktail laced with the fragile hope that things will keep getting better. As she scans the crowds, searching for her target, the teenaged girl tries to ignore the acidic aftertaste of fear – fear that what’s been birthed here will collapse in on itself.

It feels like darkness. Numb blindness, the kind she knows all too well, clouds the eyes of every unfortunate man, woman, and child who finds themselves here. They can’t sense it, and they never have, but when they stop to smell the air or brush fingers with the person they love, pinpricks of light shine like stars at the corners of their vision.

You can’t hear the darkness, or taste it, or even smell it, but the innocent part of your soul knows it’s there. But until it’s revealed, you may as well sit in the dark and wait, as the Marrow Street entourage has practiced for years.

Not Safran. She sees.