ENTRY INTO THE MEMORY PALACE
Consequences
In His Name, Most High
Murcia. He was supposed to meet me in Murcia, take this cursed book out of my hands. What had it gotten me? The calls aching in my throat. The intelligences and their signs of power, sigils writ as if hanging in the air, pulsing with their own cold life. No being interested in enlightening the children of Adam waits in those constellations, nor any of the isolated stars listed in the book's fourth through sixth appendices. Jackals, at best, vultures, and remoras, and maddening things with no means of communing with man except through wicked jest. My eyes, still singed with the sights given me in the conjuration of the King in Aldebaran. No, I had best be well shot of the whole affair, and return to an ordinary life as a scholar and an ordinary piety. But the Corsican tyrant's soldiers had torn up the roads and land, I had been arrested and questioned and plucked for bribes twice, I was weeks late to Murcia. Now outside the city I waited by the appointed inn, waited and spent the days telling beads with the Name and keeping my heart and mind closed to the intelligences that still whispered to me from around unseen corners in space.
Entry in Memory Palaces
In His Name, Most High
Preliminary survey of the Ipsissimal MS reveals several sections in which decryption and deciphering may yield good results. This I speculate based on the presence the similarity to known Hermetic and Cabalist designs, as well as on the occurrence of tables and charts suggestive of correspondences. Furthermore, the MS contains four sections written in a different cypher or, perhaps, language. Each of these accompanies designs or sigils of a form quite unknown to me. It may be that the Marquis de Illicque was an unusually fecund magus, or that he had access to arts and disciplines outside the normal curriculum.
The Sab
In His Name, the Most High
The MS came to me first in dreams before arising. While in Catalonia I chanced to stay in a ruined villa between Murcia and San B_____. The grounds were particularly notable for a half-buried, fortified wall crowned with Almohad emblems. The Moorish element in my much co-mingled ancestry was pleased at this survival and, rather than push on to the next village, there I rested. In the dawn light it seemed to me a great vast man stood shadowed against the eastern quarter of the sky, his curiously formed hand gesturing to the corner of the wall. The rising sun sent me to my orisons and I thought no more of the vision until, draughting a plan of the villa, I noticed the well was yet in good repair. Did shepherds come by? There was, after all, no trace of sheep. Removing the cover of the well, my eye fell upon the figure of a hand --but one with two curving thumbs and five slender fingers between them. In an instant I saw that this was the hand I had seen before rising, the extra digits distorting its expected shape in profile. At the crumbling corner of the wall I could easily prise earth and loose masonry apart, and a lead-lined chest gradually appeared.
In His Name, Most High
Murcia. He was supposed to meet me in Murcia, take this cursed book out of my hands. What had it gotten me? The calls aching in my throat. The intelligences and their signs of power, sigils writ as if hanging in the air, pulsing with their own cold life. No being interested in enlightening the children of Adam waits in those constellations, nor any of the isolated stars listed in the book's fourth through sixth appendices. Jackals, at best, vultures, and remoras, and maddening things with no means of communing with man except through wicked jest. My eyes, still singed with the sights given me in the conjuration of the King in Aldebaran. No, I had best be well shot of the whole affair, and return to an ordinary life as a scholar and an ordinary piety. But the Corsican tyrant's soldiers had torn up the roads and land, I had been arrested and questioned and plucked for bribes twice, I was weeks late to Murcia. Now outside the city I waited by the appointed inn, waited and spent the days telling beads with the Name and keeping my heart and mind closed to the intelligences that still whispered to me from around unseen corners in space.
Entry in Memory Palaces
In His Name, Most High
Preliminary survey of the Ipsissimal MS reveals several sections in which decryption and deciphering may yield good results. This I speculate based on the presence the similarity to known Hermetic and Cabalist designs, as well as on the occurrence of tables and charts suggestive of correspondences. Furthermore, the MS contains four sections written in a different cypher or, perhaps, language. Each of these accompanies designs or sigils of a form quite unknown to me. It may be that the Marquis de Illicque was an unusually fecund magus, or that he had access to arts and disciplines outside the normal curriculum.
The Sab
In His Name, the Most High
The MS came to me first in dreams before arising. While in Catalonia I chanced to stay in a ruined villa between Murcia and San B_____. The grounds were particularly notable for a half-buried, fortified wall crowned with Almohad emblems. The Moorish element in my much co-mingled ancestry was pleased at this survival and, rather than push on to the next village, there I rested. In the dawn light it seemed to me a great vast man stood shadowed against the eastern quarter of the sky, his curiously formed hand gesturing to the corner of the wall. The rising sun sent me to my orisons and I thought no more of the vision until, draughting a plan of the villa, I noticed the well was yet in good repair. Did shepherds come by? There was, after all, no trace of sheep. Removing the cover of the well, my eye fell upon the figure of a hand --but one with two curving thumbs and five slender fingers between them. In an instant I saw that this was the hand I had seen before rising, the extra digits distorting its expected shape in profile. At the crumbling corner of the wall I could easily prise earth and loose masonry apart, and a lead-lined chest gradually appeared.
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