View source for This/Hunters song

There were too many people. Too many fragments. Lilya Coren liked fragments, but she understood the importance of moderation - people got confused if there was too much of anything. Confused, worried, angry, fearful... that was people. So everything needed to fit, to suit the people.

The problem was, there were too many people. And Coren simply did not know what to do about this. Too many to keep track of, too many to manage. Too much to follow. The story is too complicated, the guest list too long, the party just plain and simply too large. And simplifying it at this point is simply not an option. This is the world, after all, and everyone in it has their place, and everyone has an effect, no matter how small, that affects the whole. 

So all there is to do is to go on. To smile and to mingle and to don the mask of belonging, to be a person for a little while and to be a part of the party that she had gone to all this trouble to put on. So Lilya Coren smiled, took the hand of her colleague, and walked out onto the floor, amidst the music and the colour and the vibrancy that everyone held so dear. This was the world they lived in, so she would live in it too, but though it remained alien to her, they would never know it. She moved from group to group, making conversation, noting interests and lies, and weaving all of those who had answered the invitation into her web.




Time is, of course, supposed to be viewed in order. It's like a good landscape painting - if you only look at small pieces of it in no particular order, you might wind up seeing all of it, but it won't look anything like all of it, just a bit of tree here, some grass there, some mountainy bits, some random birds in the sky, a piece of a cow - it might be interesting, but it doesn't give you the big picture unless you look at all of it as all of it, in some semblance of order. It doesn't tell you the story unless you can see what's going on.

Coren was good at landscapes. In fact she was good at most pictures, everything from portraits to fractals to the abstract. She ought to be. She had spent most of her life painting. Painting, scamming, killing, and then trying to understand it all, because quite frankly it didn't make a whole lot of sense. Life, that is. And death, really.

The only things Lilya Coren truly understood were paint and how to kill. She was good with people, oh, she was very good with them, but she didn't understand them. She could kill them, but that didn't really help. If anything, it made it worse. But she could also scam them, and while that also didn't really help, it had made a good living for her.

It had been something, at least.

Now, though, she had more. She had, in a way, a family - people who understood her and accepted her for who and what she was, and while they weren't necessarily happy about it, neither, frankly, was she. And that helped, somehow.

And she had a job, not only that was entirely legal and paid real money, but was also, in its own disturbing way, a satisfying one. 

Coren was a hunter, and in this job was the hunt.