The Fourth Rule: "Magic is hidden."

"So now that you have had the scales removed from your eyes, what do you see?" Knave asked me.

I looked around. We were standing in a parking lot of a 7-11. "It looks...pretty much the same," I said.

"You're still only seeing the surface," Knave said. "You need to look deeper. You've saw that man back there-"

"And what was he?" I asked. "Was he some sort of ghost?"

"No no no," Knave said. "Ghosts are echoes, the leftover light of things. Stone tapes and faded recordings. If the universe was a map pinned to a wall, a ghost would be the half-erased pencil marks."

"And that man?"

"That man," Knave said, grinning, "would be a pen."

"I don't get it," I said.

"Of course not," he said. "You're still not seeing. Magic is hidden, you see, so to find out how to work it, you must first uncover it. Have you ever heard of mystery cults? Little religions that sprang up in Greece and Rome, people who worshiped their gods in private, with ceremonies and rituals that only they knew. Those people knew the secret power of the hidden, of the obscure, of the occult."

He stepped behind me and put both his hands over my eyes. "You need to look at what's really there. When I take away my hands, you are going to concentrate, like you did before with the man, and you are going to see."

I felt silly, like we were playing some sort of game of hide and seek. But Knave dutifully counted to three and then removed his hands.

And the world around me exploded into light and color. The hidden was revealed to me, the strange underpinnings of reality were visible, the strings that not only hold us together, but keep us apart. I saw waves of electricity, weirdly visible to me, as if I was in the middle of an ocean of light.

"Telluric currents," Knave said. "They are everywhere and yet we never see them. And those-" He pointed to lines of vivid color which I cannot even begin to describe. "-those are songlines, dreaming tracks. By singing the right songs, you could transverse across the songlines and end up at any part of the world."

I was in awe. My brain couldn't handle all the information it was receiving. My eyes were watering, yet they refused to blink, not wanting to give up all this information they were seeing even for a second.

And then blackness descended. Knave had covered my eyes again and when he took away his hands, the world was back to being dark and drab.

"You can't look all the time," he said, "or else it wouldn't be hidden, now would it?"

He gave me another grin and I got the distinct impression that he was messing with me. I did not care. Right then and there, I would have given anything to see the world like that again.