I skipped the ten days between the cataclysm and Ancelet’s visit to the prison. These were important days, the days of Ancelet’s election, of more arrests, of counting Perry-Kraye’s victims, of press conferences confirming facts and fears already half public. The whole world held its breath, a frozen, false calm, like rabbits praying that the predator won’t see us if we don’t move. Businesses closed, towns ordered curfews, bash’es stayed home to watch again and again the videos of Sniper at Madame’s, of Tully Mardi’s war sermons, of Perry-Kraye’s maniacal last moments laughing amid Brussels’s flames, and of what no one wanted to call Jehovah’s death. I barely remember. If ever, reader, you have seen a graveyard, where the centuries of Zeus’s tempests have rinsed away the faces of carved angels and the names they mourned, my memory is much the same. Facts which in a sane mind would stay clear wear away quickly, their contours barely traceable upon the weather-beaten stones. Here and there a monument is carved of sterner stuff, some porphyry or dense volcanic basalt that endures time’s touch, still legible. The seven recent days of transformation are the graveyard’s central monument, each step in the chain from the theft of Sugiyama’s Seven-Ten list to Bridger’s final deed etched deep enough to withstand an aeon’s war with wind and rain. Yet the ten days that followed are a blur. They were a blur even as I lived them, the haze of grief leeching the strength from me like fever, swamp mud, gravity, old age, the many fetters Fortune uses to remind us that the strength of flesh is hers to grant and take away. I cannot even say which fortress—Paris? Alexandria?—served as my protective prison, or what I did those days apart from mourn and serve as translator for the Great Scroll’s Addressee, Whom I am fortunate to call my Master. His contact with His Divine Peer had left Him so invigorated that He had to learn again, as if from scratch, how to sort His languages as humans do. I could research those ten lost days, but crisis may at any moment cut my writing short, so I will first record what I remember, those few still-legible inscriptions already fading in the graveyard where only the days of transformation stand truly indelible.

Liar. Thou forgetest how well I know thee by now, Mycroft Canner. Thou canst not pretend that the week of transformation is truly thy most vivid memory.

You are with me again, then, are you, gentle reader? I had hoped you’d come. It is a strangely lonely labor, this chronicle which, by law, no contemporary eye may see. I am glad to have somebody share it.