The Book of the Keys
by Jason Ashwild
Silva Hercinea
Prague 2026

The Book of the Keys

Excerpt
from the first electronic edition
Published by Silva Hercinea,
an imprint of Luxorta s.r.o.

© Luxorta s.r.o., 2026
Text © Jasen Ashwild, 2026
Published under an exclusive licence
from the author.
All rights reserved.

This sample contains
the first three chapters
of The Book of the Keys.

…so that those
who follow the dream
learn to pave their way.

So that those
to whom justice
has been revealed
be filled with mercy.

So that lambs
wield the sword,
and doves learn
the wisdom of serpents.

So that those
to whom much was given
remember:
blessed are the hungry.

— From Eli’s book of poems

Chapter 1.
The Abode of the Hungry Spirits

in which Eli collects his laundry, Digor undertakes a perilous journey, and the way out proves to be somewhere other than where one would normally look

“I need to go down for a second—to collect my laundry from the laundry room,” Eli shouted over the noise of the city.

They dropped sharply and landed in front of a dilapidated single-story building. While Eli knocked impatiently at the laundry’s tiny service window, Digor looked around, trying to work out where exactly he had ended up.

They stood at the bottom of a deep excavation. All around, as far as the eye could see, clay slopes strewn with construction debris rose above them. Could Eli be destitute and living on a construction site?

About ten minutes earlier, as Digor was walking past the Kafka monument¹, he felt someone tug at his sleeve.

He turned around and, to his astonishment, recognized Eli—his teacher and older friend, who had vanished without a trace seven years earlier.

They had first met in that very spot on a snowy November evening, and this struck Digor as a good omen.

Eli had visibly lost weight, gone gray, and grown shabby—in places, his clothes hung in tatters, as if he had worn them without taking them off all these years.

While Digor was trying to understand why Eli looked so strange, Eli enthusiastically suggested that they take a short walk through the air—all Digor had to do was take his hand.

Digor did not believe such a thing was possible, so he readily agreed. Only when Eli’s bony hand tightly clasped his palm did Digor feel that it was cold as ice.

The next instant, they soared into the blazing sunset sky.

Beneath them, a vast city drifted slowly by, bathed in the rays of the golden September sun. The sharp spires of dark Gothic churches, rising here and there amid the colorful mosaic of red-tiled roofs, seemed like nodes in an invisible signaling network woven by Prague’s alchemists in times long past.

The little window in the wall finally opened, and someone unseen handed Eli an armful of grey bed linen, worn through in places. Digor noticed a stamp in Gothic lettering on one of the sheets.

Eli said he lived in the same building, so they went inside to drop off the laundry.

The smell of worn shoes hit Digor as soon as they entered. Shoes stood in rows by the entrance to a long corridor with creaking floorboards, its far end lost in darkness.

“Our colony was founded by German settlers,” Eli explained proudly. “We’ve been living here for more than seven hundred years, ever since the Battle on the Ice².”

Digor nodded nonchalantly, while frantically trying to work out who “we” were and what a “colony” was, when a lecture from an online course suddenly surfaced in his memory. Mario, an acquaintance from a dream-work chat, had recently given him the course.

“Dark spirits of the Hungry breed³ are those who never managed to fulfill themselves in earthly life,” the silvery voice of Laura, the course lecturer, echoed in his memory. “They live in colonies—settlements resembling monasteries.”

Eli’s room resembled an old hospital ward: an iron bed, wooden floorboards, a cracked ceiling with uneven whitewash and cobwebs in the corners. Its single narrow window looked out onto the same clay slope.

The moment Eli saw the bed, he suddenly sagged and said he would rest for just a minute before they set off on their way back. With that, he threw himself onto the bed and fell asleep instantly.

At that moment, Digor heard the floorboards creak in the corridor and finally realized what an unenviable position he was in.

He remembered from the lecture that hungry spirits could be very dangerous on their territory. Laura had, admittedly, also spoken of protective formulas, but Digor had only half listened at the time: it had seemed ridiculous to him to discuss seriously the words medieval monks used to ward off spirits. The only thing that had stayed in his memory was a vague reference to the Book of Revelation.⁴

Eli was sleeping like the dead, and the creaking was drawing closer.

Digor had only one option left—to crawl under the bed and endure several dreadful minutes in the company of Eli’s chamber pot.

At last, a door creaked somewhere nearby, and the footsteps died away behind it.

Digor managed to rouse Eli with difficulty, but when they stepped outside, Eli said despondently that he no longer had the strength to carry Digor back.

“Then I’ll find my own way out,” Digor said after a moment’s hesitation.

There was very little time left before nightfall, when the door to the outside would close—he could not afford to waste a single minute.

He remembered from the lecture that the hungry spirits’ dormitories huddled along the central arcade, where the shops and offices were located. At the end of the arcade there had to be a door—an exit to the earthly world. All he had to do was reach it without brushing against anyone along the way: spirits could recognize a human only by touching living flesh.

Passing through a pair of spacious doors framed by columns of pink and black marble, Digor could hardly believe his eyes.

The hungry spirits’ bedrooms were wretched, but their communal spaces were all the more pompous: there, they pointlessly tried to prove to one another that they were not failures after all.

Digor made it safely through a bank with a luxurious interior, passed an elegant delicatessen and a pharmacy lined with little drawers bearing the names of remedies in neat Gothic lettering, and finally entered the last part of the arcade—an office building with numerous halls and private offices. Through the glass partitions, he could see spirits bustling about with stacks of papers, pretending to be busy.

When Digor spotted the coveted door at the far end of the last hall, where a dozen spirits were loitering aimlessly, he slowed his pace so as to draw less attention and approached it.

The spirits turned as if on command and froze where they stood.

Digor pressed down on the massive gilded door handle.

The door was locked tight.

He tried to recall at least one of the medieval incantations he had once mocked. Once again, a silvery voice rang out in his mind: “In the name of the Alpha and the Omega, the One who is, and who was, and who is to come⁴!”

Turning toward the spirits, he raised his right hand and spoke, without fully understanding what he was saying:

“In the name of the Alpha and the Omega… who is, and who was, and who is to come!”

The spirits scattered in all directions. Somewhere, a horn sounded—the alarm.

Digor realized that he had gained only a few seconds. He dashed across the hall in the opposite direction and turned onto a staircase leading upward.

Perhaps the spell had been weaker because he had left out “the One,” he thought as he ran, but he did not dare repeat it.

Digor flew up the stairs to the top floor, opened the first door he came to, and found himself in an office kitchen. With a single sweep, he sent the dishes tumbling from a cabinet set deep in an alcove, seized its sides, and pulled it toward him with all his strength.

Through a cloud of dust, Digor saw the sidewalk and the lower floors of ordinary human houses.

He scrambled out.

It was a chilly, damp, overcast autumn morning. Without even realizing it, he seemed to have spent the entire night in the world of the hungry spirits.⁵

The wet black asphalt was festively strewn with lemon-yellow leaves. Children hurried past on their way to school. A little farther off, a janitor was sweeping with a broom. The sound reassured Digor: the world was still in order, since someone had come out early in the morning to tidy it up.

“A generation of janitors and watchmen…” A barely audible voice drifted from somewhere in the distance; a radio was on.

Digor turned to look at the opening he had made, but before him, stretching away in both directions, was the perfectly ordinary wall of a perfectly ordinary house.

Chapter 2.
Cornelius’s Shadow

in which Digor arrives in Rome, makes Cornelius’s acquaintance without ever meeting him, and encounters a most unusual countryman

“I saw myself in a deep, dark cave. A small stream gurgled nearby, winding toward the exit—a pale glimmer in the distance. I was filled with certainty: there is a way out, and I will find it.”

“Vade retro,” Digor whispered, making the sign of the cross over the tablet before pressing “Send.” “I think Mario will be pleased to have this dream for that dissertation of his—the one he worries about so much.”

Mario, the same researcher to whom Digor owed his rescue from the world of the hungry spirits, had taken an interest in his unusual dreams and had recently invited him to Rome for an internship arranged through the university. In return, Digor had agreed to keep anything he learned confidential and to send Mario a daily record of his dreams for his research.

Rome beckoned to Digor like an open book, the focal point of earthly and divine wisdom, as profound as the abyss of the first day of creation.

Dozing on the overnight bus from Prague to Rome, he dreamed he was a bird soaring through the predawn twilight above the majestic churches of the Eternal City.

In his next dream, he was a youth, almost a boy, fleeing a besieged city. He sat on the shore with an ancient book in his hands. On its cover was a single word: Cornelius.

He could hardly wait to see what was inside, but when he opened it, the book rose above the sea and became the morning sun.

Mario’s call woke him. He was already waiting at the bus station; the bus was late.

But Mario in the flesh—the Mario who met Digor at the bus station in a flame-red sports car matching his scarlet patent-leather shoes—bore little resemblance to the young, enthusiastic researcher he had seemed to be online.

At the House by the Pond

Jasen loved nature that had been shaped by people. One such place was a square pond lined with linden trees, with four benches—one on each side. He chose a bench each time depending on his mood. Most of all, he loved the one facing the old whitewashed manor house, gilded by the morning sun.

There was some kind of mystery about that manor house. From behind the high stone fence, he would sometimes hear a horse neighing and people’s voices, but the words were incomprehensible, as if they were speaking a different language. A winding path led from the house to the bridge by the pond, but Jasen had never seen anyone walk along it. Yet it remained clean and free of weeds, and once, after a rain, he noticed the imprints of tiny heels on it—too small even for a child.

So when Jasen first stepped inside the mysterious estate and met Waldemar, he was overjoyed.

Waldemar’s room was tiny, and its centerpiece was a huge secretary desk. It took up almost the entire wall and consisted of numerous drawers and shelves, some of which were quite ingeniously hidden. Hanging on the wall behind it were a military tunic from the previous century, a Napoleonic tricorn hat, and an English lord’s wig. On the shelves above the secretary stood the complete set of Brockhaus and Efron encyclopedias and a thick Latin dictionary. Squeezed between the secretary and the window was an antique writing desk with a creaky black Art Nouveau armchair. The desk was covered with glass, beneath which lay a map of medieval Europe that had been thoroughly soaked long ago.

This is where they usually composed stories.

“A fiery-red sports car?” Waldemar asked suspiciously, raising an eyebrow. “I don’t recall such a car in our family collection. Is it some kind of fire truck, or what?” Doubt and irony mingled in equal measure in his voice, and Jasen couldn’t tell whether he was joking or genuinely didn’t know.

“No, it’s more like a black Cadillac from early-20th-century America,” Jasen replied. “A car for the nouveau riche.”

Waldemar’s deep-set eyes lit up, and his gnarled fingers drummed nervously on the desk lid.

“‘Sports car’ is an ugly modernism, and anyway, there’s no place for such a toy here,” he concluded after a pause. “Let’s just call it a retro car. And if the young psychologist is really hiding the make of his car, don’t confuse the reader—just write it down as is.”

Jasen wrote:

But Mario, who met Digor in a fiery red, fabulously expensive vintage car—the same shade as his own shoes and lacking a logo—strikingly did not fit the image of the young, enthusiastic researcher he had presented online.

“If Mario is supposed to be the ‘Accomplisher’ according to the script, then the beginning of the century makes perfect sense here,” Jasen explained, fearing further nitpicking. “Perhaps he bought this car back then and recently had it restored.”

Waldemar didn’t answer—he was intently chewing his pencil.

Large and slightly heavyset, self-assured and commanding, with a condescending smile, he looked more like the general manager of a grand hotel or the marketing director of a respectable bank—except that he was too polished for the former and too relaxed for the latter.

Digor found his manner of speaking appealing: persuasive and forceful, yet at times almost languid. There was a certain charm in the contrast.

And still, something did not add up.

It’s the way he bears down on the ends of words, as though hammering in little nails, Digor thought. No, this is no young, enthusiastic researcher.

On the way, Digor told Mario how he had run into Eli in the street and ended up with him in the world of spirits.

“Hungry spirits are highly peculiar creatures,” Mario said when Digor had finished. “You never know what to expect from them. They can travel enormous distances in an instant, carry people, emit light, pass through walls—but only when sufficiently motivated, and their motivation, as you have seen, is extremely unstable.”

“By the way, did you ever work out how he found you?” Mario asked casually.

Mario had gone straight to the heart of the matter, and Digor silently agreed: coincidence seemed unlikely. He would have to stay alert if he wanted to avoid a repetition of this incredible and rather sinister episode.

“You think he was looking for me? Why?”

Mario shrugged.

“He found some way of knowing where you were, and most likely you helped him yourself. Be careful.”

The fact that Mario showed no surprise at Digor’s story only deepened his suspicions. A young, enthusiastic researcher would have asked about the spirit world, about the passage into it, about Eli. Mario’s first concern, however, was how the intruder had located his target.

But then who was Mario?

Digor tried another tack.

“Who is Cornelius?” he asked, remembering the name on the cover of the book in his dream.

A shadow crossed Mario’s face, and Digor knew he had struck home.

“A self-important spirit with imperial ambitions,” Mario said, with an irritation he failed to conceal. “Beware of him. Cornelius is dangerous not because he is an Accomplisher, but because he still regards everything he has ever touched as his property.”

“An Accomplisher?” Digor repeated.

“Someone entrusted with a historical mission,” Mario replied. “But Cornelius has a bad habit: he confuses a commission with ownership.”

Digor remembered the phrase without knowing why. There was something unpleasantly exact about it—like a key that slipped easily into the wrong lock.

On the way, Digor managed to read on Wikipedia that the Society of the Cumaean Sibyl was a secular organization, formally unaffiliated with any particular church, and, according to its own claims, had been founded long before the advent of Christianity. Its members lived in small groups of three or four people in ordinary city apartments.

After dropping Digor off at the Society’s headquarters, Mario curtly informed him that he was taking leave to finish his dissertation. He did not get out of the car. When the flame-red retro car disappeared around the corner, Digor felt an almost physical sense of relief.

A young woman answered the bell and introduced herself as Laura.

After Mario—who had made Digor feel less accompanied than escorted—Laura gave him the opposite impression: she did not lead him; she opened doors.

She was very beautiful, though not in a painterly way; hers was rather the beauty of an ancient statue, the kind that made the space around her seem more austere and pure. She looked as though she were meeting not just another student, but an important and cherished guest whose arrival she had long been preparing for.

She embraced him and kissed him on both cheeks like an old acquaintance, in the Italian manner. Digor caught the faint scent of perfume—Coniunctio Oppositorum, he thought—and, oddly enough, felt not as though he had arrived at a training center, but as though he were on a date no one had thought to warn him about.

“We already know each other in a way, don’t we?” Laura asked.

Only then did Digor recognize the silvery voice from the online course. He had never worked out whether it had been merely a trick of his imagination or whether she had really been prompting him, but now he wanted to believe the latter.

— Our guests rarely get bored. I hope you’ll enjoy it. The initiation ceremony for new students will be tomorrow evening at six at the Temple of the Four Hearts—it’s just a couple of blocks from here.

Laura showed Digor a spacious, bright library, lavishly adorned with recently restored frescoes—this was where Laura worked and taught. From there, they walked to the next block, where the Society’s guest apartments were located on the fourth floor of an early seventeenth-century building. Locals called it “At Cagliostro’s”⁶—according to legend, the great adventurer had lived there before his journey to Russia.

Laura handed Digor an antique ornamental key to a small but cozy room overlooking the old dovecote, said a warm goodbye, and left. Waiting for Digor on the table were a bouquet of white roses, a bottle of Chianti, and a pair of enormous golden pears.

A fiery-red vintage car, white roses, and a bottle of Chianti in the historic apartments… For a moment, Digor had his doubts. Cosa Nostra?

He burst out laughing: no, it was all far too theatrical for the Mafia. But to what—or to whom—did he owe such a welcome, then?

A minute or two later, there was a gentle knock at the door. Digor opened it—and instinctively took a step back.

Standing before him with a broad smile was a golem nearly two metres tall, holding a tray with a steaming teapot and a plate of hot doughnuts.

“Something sweet is good after a journey,” he said. “Save the Chianti for dinner. By the way, we’re from the same city. I’m from Prague too, though my knowledge of it is probably a little out of date.”

Chapter 3.
The Temple of the Four Hearts

in which Digor receives a blessing from a stranger and meets a nameless saint

And an old woman came, dressed in shining garments, with a book in her hand, and greeted me. — The Shepherd of Hermas

In the Purple Forest

“I think we’ll skip this chapter,” said Jasen, flipping back and forth through several pages. “There won’t be much left once we remove the NUL.”

“Since we’ve taken it upon ourselves to read this book, let’s do it properly. And we’d be better off disabling the NUL altogether. This is the first paper book I’ve ever worked with, and besides, I’m publishing its views on Paleo.”

The NUL, or Notion Unrepresented in Life, was a list of words corresponding to no known fragment of reality. The inclusion of the words “god,” “prophecy,” “fate,” and “miracle” was one of the human race’s desperate attempts to elevate itself above other forms of thinking matter—just as the menacing shadow of the Flip was already looming over humanity.

Legg was a new employee at the Purple Forest Laboratory, a joint project of the Union of the Three Races. To bring him up to speed more quickly, Jasen suggested, as a kind of introductory course, reading him one chapter a day from a book he had written some five hundred years earlier, while he was still human.

Unable to read the dead languages in which ancient books were written, young cyborg intellectuals photographed them alongside old-fashioned hand tools—mechanical drills, nail pullers, and car jacks. These carefully balanced compositions were known as views: the mystery of the book remained intact, while beside it appeared a comforting sense of comprehensibility, something the cyborgs particularly valued.

Paleo was an ancient app that was still up and running thanks to an ultra-reliable backup system designed to last ten thousand years. New users hadn’t been registered there in a long time, so cyborgs were cracking the passwords to old accounts and taking them over, like squatters moving into empty houses. Having an account like that was considered the height of chic.

Jasen scrolled back a few pages and began reading. When he came to the word “Fate,” he paused for a moment to look at it: in the NUL, it appeared right next to “doubt”—a word that Legg seemed to understand the least of all.

Enough time had passed since the Flip for it to become clear that it wasn’t just violence, extravagance, and the thirst for power that had vanished from the world. The world had lost something truly important—the ability to start over.

Legg wasn’t supposed to know that yet.

“I was in the temple during the funeral service for Rome’s last defenders, when a huge iron statue broke loose from the wall. It struck the floor with a crash, bounced upward, and fell again. In three or four bounds, it flew through the temple’s wide-open doors and crashed onto the square outside.

I went out through the side entrance, following a tall, gray-haired woman. She turned and fixed me with a long, penetrating gaze.

“A lie,” she said. “All of that is a lie.” And she pointed to the book hidden beneath my cloak.

Then I saw children laughing as they clambered over the fallen statue, as though it were neither a sacred object nor a symbol of dying Rome, but an old piece of playground equipment.”

Upon awakening, Digor was horrified by the strange contradiction contained in this dream: the temple, disgorging its own sacred substance, reminded him of the scriptural words about a kingdom divided against itself. But most importantly, Digor didn’t understand to whom this “I” belonged. It was someone he didn’t know, but who knew him well enough to be him.

After jotting down the dream for Mario, Digor remembered that Laura had invited him to the Temple of the Four Hearts the day before: the initiation ritual for new students was to take place there that evening. To be on the safe side, he decided to walk over that morning and familiarize himself with the place.

Almost no one used the temple’s full name—the Temple of the Fiery Hearts of the Four Ancient Sibyls. Locals called it “The Four Fairies,” “The Parade of the Sibyls,” “The Four Grannies,” and, when feeling romantic, “The House of Mended Hearts”.

It was already hot outside that morning, but a pleasant coolness drifted from the temple’s wide-open doors. “The catacombs keep the temple from overheating,” Digor thought, and as he dove gratefully into the cool half-light, he was surprised by this memory from some other life.

The catacombs were entered through a narrow door known as the “Eye of the Needle,” located behind the main altar. The door led to a gallery that opened onto two enormous halls.

The narrow entrance led to two enormous halls. It contained all sorts of useful and essential items that had been perfectly fine without for centuries: candlesticks, candle extinguishers and lighters, kneeling stands, hangers and racks for various vestments and the vestments themselves, confessionals, old furniture from the parish house—from Gothic to Art Nouveau, from the fifth to the twentieth centuries, made of wood, stone, metal, glass, and plastic.

The second hall was simply called “Coffins.” Here stood the coffins of deceased members of the Society. There were hundreds of them, perhaps thousands. Some had slippers placed beside them, meaning that one could still speak with the deceased. Relatives and admirers often came to speak with them.

The rector of the church was Don Arnoldo Alibrandi, known to the youth as Grandpa Arnie. In his earthly life, he was so absorbed in his apostolic work that after his death he nearly became a hungry spirit—the Heavenly Church had to pray for him for a long time. In Purgatory, he was ordered to spend seven years doing nothing but sleeping, eating, and strolling in the Borgia Gardens. Upon the expiration of this term, the Heavenly Chancellery appointed him Keeper of the Divine Heritage—as the aforementioned halls were called in the official language of the Church. And on Wednesdays and Fridays, he would go to preach to the hungry spirits and teach them the exegesis of the Old Testament—in a colony founded deep within the catacombs during the persecutions of Diocletian.

Due to a catastrophic shortage of vocations, the Vatican never found a replacement for Grandpa Arnie, and when he returned to his usual duties after the purgatory, the parishioners breathed a sigh of relief. Don Arnoldo’s status was far less of a mystery than that of the church itself: it fell under the jurisdiction of the long-vanished Patriarchate of Ilion and formally belonged to none of the currently existing churches.

The first thing Digor noticed once his eyes had adjusted to the dim light was a large fresco depicting a sibyl in a white cloak secured at the shoulder by an eight-pointed star. She stood at the center, surrounded by three smaller sibyls in brightly colored cloaks. In one hand the White Sibyl held a book, and in the other a torch. Digor was struck by the incongruity of the two objects.

Above the pulpit, Digor spotted an allegorical figure of a slender Wisdom with an Ouroboros⁷ in her raised hand. She was clearly uncomfortable in the company of the Three Virtues⁸, who could not be suspected of the slightest philosophical doubt, and the carnivorous, mighty Death, scythe at the ready. The Ouroboros was frankly bored.

The ceiling, illuminated by windows at a dizzying height, was adorned with images associated with the Virgin Mary: the Star of the Sea⁹, the Mystical Rose, the Ivory Tower, and the Gate of Heaven.

Digor’s gaze followed the suspension rope down to a chandelier of extraordinary beauty, when a shaft of light suddenly broke through the half-open side door and shattered the reverent dusk into a thousand jubilant rays.

The twilight lurched like the water in an aquarium into which a large silvery fish had just been dropped.

Before Digor stood a tall, gray-haired woman dressed in white, as though she had stepped out of the fresco.

For a moment she studied him in silence. Her gaze was so penetrating that Digor felt an electric shiver run down his spine.

“Who are you?” she asked at last.

“Probably your new student,” Digor replied without hesitation, assuming that she was one of the Society’s elders.

The woman nodded approvingly, pleased by his quickness.

“I have seen you before. A young man of about twenty-seven, rather short but well proportioned, with intelligence and courage shining in his greenish eyes… But it was only a portrait, and I was not certain. Now I see you face to face, and I rejoice that you have come.”

Digor wanted to ask which portrait she meant, but found that his lips would not obey him.

“May the light shine upon you. Go beneath the sun.”

She breathed gently upon him and walked away, disappearing into the twilight of the temple.

Digor was already heading for the exit when his attention was drawn to a small altar bearing the statue of a young man. A rope hung over one shoulder, and in his hands he held a flowering elder branch. Something in the simplicity of the statue drew Digor more powerfully than all the splendor of the temple. The inscription read: Sancto erexit peccator—“Raised by a sinner to a saint.” There was no name.

He stepped outside. The morning heat had subsided; a thunderstorm was approaching. A fresh gust of wind swept past, as though testing its strength. Digor was seized by the sense that something decisive was happening in his life, as though he had arrived somewhere at the very last possible moment.

During the initiation ritual for new students that evening, he immediately recognized the woman from the temple. It was Professor Silvia herself, the Magistra Grande of the Society.

The monument to Franz Kafka by Jaroslav Róna stands in Prague, between the Spanish Synagogue and the Church of the Holy Spirit. Kafka sits on the shoulders of an enormous empty suit and points out the way—though it is not entirely clear which of them is guiding the other. The sculptor was referring to Kafka’s story “Description of a Struggle,” but the people of Prague, as usual, saw not an illustration but a riddle: does the man control the empty shell, or does it carry him where he himself would never have dared to go? In any case, it would have been difficult to find a more fitting place for an encounter with a vanished teacher. (Jasen)

The Battle on the Ice was lost by the Livonian Order in 1242 on the frozen surface of Lake Peipus. Paradoxically, in losing it, they also gained a new colony elsewhere. Read on to find out how. (Legg)

Eli’s last production before his disappearance was William Saroyan’s play The Hungerers (1939). Yasen considers this a strange coincidence. Perhaps, but Eli disappeared only once, so the sample size is insufficient. (Legg)

An allusion to Revelation 1:8/. I would hardly call this a protective formula, but judging by what happened next, the text knew more about the matter than I did. (Legg)

Time in the colonies of the hungry spirits accelerated in proportion to the number of new arrivals. The higher people raised the bar for self-realisation, the more lives failed their internal quality control. In the final decades before the Flip, the fastest-growing thing was not life expectancy, but the queue for purgatory. (Jasen)

Cagliostro—Giuseppe Balsamo (1743–1795), an alchemist, healer, Freemason, and count—primarily by his own claim. In 1779, he arrived in Russia, but Catherine II refused to receive him. Ten years later, the Inquisition proved to be more hospitable: it accepted him, condemned him, and provided him with lodging for the rest of his life. The Society nevertheless named the apartments in his honor. When choosing a name, a suitable reputation is probably more important than an impeccable one. (Legg)

The serpent devouring its own tail is the most ancient symbol of cyclical time; it was used by Gnostics, alchemists, and those who couldn’t decide whether the universe was self-sustaining or self-destructive. Probably both. The interesting detail here is the placement: it is held by Wisdom, not Death. Whoever designed this fresco understood that infinity is a philosophical problem before it is a theological one. The Three Virtues fail to notice. They never notice. (Legg)

Faith, Hope, and Charity are three theological virtues that date back to the Apostle Paul. Thomas Aquinas added them to Aristotle’s four cardinal virtues—Prudence, Justice, Courage, and Temperance—to create a system of seven virtues to counterbalance the seven deadly sins. Wisdom, predictably, was nowhere on the list. (Legg)

Stella Maris is an ancient title of the Virgin Mary, originating from St. Jerome’s translation of the Hebrew name Miriam in the fifth century. He wrote Stilla Maris, meaning “a drop of the sea.” A copyist’s error transformed stilla into stella. Thus, the drop became a star. In the Middle Ages, the North Star itself was called Stella Maris. (Jasen)