Moth on a Hot Lightbulb

"You're never going to find the lost city before us" the dark figure says in a slick voice.  

I'm just coming back to consciousness.  A bit groggy.  Remembering how much head wounds tend to bleed.  The room is dark, with only one single light source.  A naked bulb hanging over the table I was seated at that looked so old Edison could have built it himself.  The dark figure's large brimmed hat casts a dark shadow hiding their face in the warm minimalist lighting.  It's at this moment I realize my hands are tied with coarse rope.

"Seekers like you can rarely keep it together long enough to even find some of the first clues."  the dark figure continues.  "I'd rather dedicate my sanity to keeping that monster detained then let you cultists find him" I croak, my mouth dry.  Apparently I was out longer than I thought.

"Seekers like you never know when to stop" the dark figure says in a lower register.  As if on cue a rather sizeable moth fluttered around the ancient light bulb, landed on it, and promptly burnt its feet and wingtips off, falling to the table below.  It thrashes for a minute before becoming still.  "Well that's just poetic" I think.

"So what happens now?" I cough.  "Now?" the dark figure chuckles.  "Now you make your move."  Silence ensues.

There's two things I keep in my boots at all times.  A small knife, and a universal handcuff key.  Because you never know what kind of fun trouble you're going to get into.  As I was having a nice little chat with the cultist my eyes never left the shadow under the hat brim, and I learned that they never bothered to search me.  Sloppy.  All the while I was preparing to cut my bonds.  I've actually practiced this maneuver and religiously kept this knife sharp as a scalpel for exact situations like this.  I sliced through the rope with ease and immediately threw the knife at my captor.

My shadowed host's head snapped back.  Finally bringing their face to light.  It was far more fish than human.  All bulging eyes, and clammy skin that had maybe a little too much irrodecence to it.  The mouth was the most disturbing.  A rat's nest of tentacles.  Like that box of random USB cables you swear you're going to untangle some day.

Suddenly the room became too bright.  Then when I removed my arm from my eyes I saw that I was somewhere else.  No longer in a dark room with the impossibly old bulb.  I was in a cold  fluorescent tube lit police station.  A cuff still dangling from my left wrist.  Sitting across an interrogation table from a police officer with a knife in his throat.

The old ones play with your sanity.  So sometimes you have to burn it as fuel to survive.  That's the reason why we are called Seekers, or Agents of Chaos.  We're not only seeking the lost city, but what is the true reality.