The Bar and the Beasts

I had been stranded in my chamber for years, perhaps even decades. No sickness or physical impediment barred me from the outdoors, only a simple, infinite dread of the outside world. Elevated above the city, I was severed from a life which was not invisible, for I could see them all, some distance below me, milling to and fro, streaming this way and that, through the streets. Such terror was the population, that I gained a faint pleasure at being able to view it, as one views the cold while s...