Satrap of Saturn

Doc Illig, sometime celebrity science popularizer and streaming personality, best-selling writer, deep sea explorer, controversial treasure-hunter, mesmerist... Doc Illig has quiet quit from the intellectual influencer game, with rumors of substantial financing, both crowdfunded and donations from Silicon Valley futurists. The good Doktor observes exquisite data hygiene and operational security, but each of his monthly videos features intriguing objects placed oh so casually by his elbow or shoulder: a mastodon tooth and a picture frame incorporated bowhead whale teeth strongly suggest the Alaskan panhandle or islands of British Columbia. It is indeed a luxury mad scientist base, tidewater adjacent for interactions with deep ones, who are entirely blasé about their transactions with Illig. They borrow his cars without asking, apparently going for joyrides or private errand; they tinker with his observatory equipment at will, installing biological objects still dripping saltwater and m...

[third draft? still problems with run-ons and occult obscurity] Adepts, give heart and ear to Harry Crosby and the memory palaces that he and his woman, Caresse, hid in the Dreamlands, accessed by a mental geometry or projection through pass operations into bubble dream realms limned by their combined efforts, by their unusual degree of telepathy, but foremost through obsessive desire to use the queer artifacts and expunge the visions from their minds that so forced themselves upon the pair after their early explorations revealed long-dead horrors wreaked by Harry's ancestral wizard. His blood-born authority to enter the old sites also marked him as the blood-bonded holder of an obligation, and and debt... What they did to complete and discharge the centuries-delayed obligation, they did only by compulsion, and only with the operational knowledge their witless trespass into the saturated space of the ritual centers had forced into Harry's mind, the first of the Crosby line to e...

It took four months for my mouth to heal, almost a year before i could use my new tongue for everything the old one had been capable of. While i waited there was much to distract me from the pain, the silence and the entirely new approach to food. Lessons in dance and stillness with the Sisters Aeikinatai, observing those of the rites as i was permitted, training in and without weapons under the Sisters Eupsilikai, and much menial labor. Goats to milk, wool to spin, pilgrims to bless on the holy days (which duty seemed to me little different from caring for goats), and shifts in the kitchen and workshops. As a novice, my primary exercise was that of self-restraint: i was a Glossariodas in physique alone, and trying the gifts of a full sister too soon is unpredictable. Some Sisters have early facility with their tongues, and understand its mysteries well before their second year. Once it has surely grown one with our own flesh, we may practice the hand, the serpent-lash, the arrow and o...

Adepts, give heart and ear to Harry Crosby and the memory palaces that he and his woman, Caresse, hid in the Dreamlands, accessed by a projection through past operations, impaled their every faculty on the hypometrics between the bubble demesnes they limned by their combined efforts, and thus survived the payment of the debt.  They did not satisfy the Crosby blood with the usual toil at secret arts and obscure colloquy, nor with their unusual degree of telepathy, but foremost through obsessive desire to expunge the visions from their minds, sights that so forced themselves upon the pair after their dabbling revealed long-dead horrors wreaked by Harry's wizard ancestor. His blood-born authority to enter the old sites also marked him as the blood-bonded holder of an obligation, a commission... What they did to complete and discharge the centuries-delayed obligation, they did only by compulsion, and only with the operational knowledge their witless trespass into the saturated space of...

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