The kagluyag crave the perfect storm. My name is Ramon, Nephilim Reeve for this scattered archipelago, world-weary overseer of these centuries’ affairs. I take no sides.

Our parents came here when the human race was young and impressionable. They gushed over our ancestors’ knowledge and magic and art  and asked to be consumed by them, till the humans bore offspring that were not so much human as they were ever-hungry and ever-arrogant about their mastery of life on earth.

I am one such creature.

But I am only here to watch, for what is there to do? We don’t really die, not really, and the mists of time are not as soluble as one might think. Instead, this.

The torture of witness. For unlike the kagluyag, whose history you will find is not much different from mine, despite the metaphysical bullshit that threatens to reduce their existence to folly, I have begun to know things. Don’t be fooled. The kagluyag are beside you, sipping gin, watching you sleep, wake up, go to work or school and grapple with domestic life. The kagluyag are your mail man, the stranger you pass in your commute, the tanod, the unremarkable masses, the people you only notice when you notice they’re not there, like when rain has begun, or night has fallen.

They are scientists. They have been observing you for years. They have maps of your brain. They have reams of documentation about the unlikely reaction you outwardly showed when the man or woman you fancied presented you with a blunt question: pheromone levels, context, setting, caffeine intake over time, perception of threat, perception of status, three childhood memories that had significant bearing in your current-day reflexes, everything. They know everything.

The explosion of the individual’s story portrayed in countless media of communication is a testament to this close-quarter surveillance of humanity. Osmosis. Where else will the databases of meaning go but back out into the world, where they celebrate it, the story of man, digital excrement of the disgusting human preoccupation with themselves.

This is the reason I took on Dante, who, for all intents and purposes, is the unsung wildcard that the world itself has given birth to. Dante does not know this, but he has a fucked up relationship with time.