phobophage assault

I shook my head. I stared at the room for a second and then chewed on my lower lip for a second, coming to a decision. I closed my eyes, clearing my thoughts.
"That's enough," Rawlins said. "Shut the door before people start to stare."
"One second," I murmured. Then with an effort of focus and will, and a faint sense of illusory pressure on my forehead, I opened my wizard's Sight.
The Sight is something anyone born with enough talent has. It's an extra sense, though when using it almost everyone experiences it as a kind of augmented vision. It shows you the primal nature of things, the true and emotional core of what they are. It also shows you the presence of magical energies that course through pretty much everything on the planet, showing you how that energy flowed and pulsed and swirled through the world. The Sight was especially useful for looking for any active magical constructs- that's spells, for the newbie-and for cutting through illusions and spells meant to obfuscate what was true.
I opened my Sight and it showed me what my physical eyes could not see about the room. It showed me something that, with as many bad things as I had seen in my life, still made me clench my fists and fight to keep from losing control of my stomach.
The site of the attack, the blood, the brutality and pain inflicted upon the victim, had not been a simple matter of desire, conflict, and violence.
It had been a deliberate, gleeful work of art.
I could see patterns in the bloodstain, patterns that showed me the terrified face of an old man, pounded into a lumpy, unrecognizable mass by sledgehammer fists, each one a miniature portrait painted in the medium of terror and pain. When I looked at the smears on the sink, I could hear a short series of grunts meant to be desperate cries for help. And then the old man was hurled back down for another round of splatter portraits of pain.
And just for a second, I saw a shadow on the wall-a brief glimpse, a form, a shape, something that left an outline of itself on the wall where it had absorbed the agonized energy of the old man's suffering.
I fought to push the Sight away from my perceptions again, and staggered. That was the drawback to using the Sight. The Sight could show you a lot of things, but everything you saw with it was there to stay. It wrote everything you perceived with it upon your memory in indelible ink, and those memories were always there, fresh and harsh when you went back to them, never blurring with the passage of time, never growing easier to endure. The little demonic diorama of bad vibes painted over the white tiles of that bathroom was going to make some appearances in my darker dreams.
It looked like I'd found the black magic the Gatekeeper warned me about. Just as well that I hadn't tried the dangerous spell with Little Chicago.
I took a couple of steps away, shaking away the flickers of color and sparkles of light on my vision that remained for a time when the Sight was gone once more. Rawlins had a hand under one of my elbows.
"You all right, man?" he rumbled a moment later, his voice very quiet.
"Yeah," I said. "Yeah. Thanks."
He looked from me to the closed door and back. "What did you see in there?"
"I'm not sure yet," I said. My voice sounded shaky. "Something bad."


Proven Guilty Chapter 11, Page 77-79