“Descendet sicut pluvia in vellus. She will come down like rain on the grass, like the torrential rain that waters the Earth. During her days, justice and great peace will flower while the Moon shines. And she will reign from sea to sea, from the River to the very edges of the Earth. And thus shall it be unto the end of the world, for she is the Spirit.

“Bow down before her. Accept and know her power.”

Samson, scratching the scar on his shaved head, listened to the account, acquainted himself with Reynevan’s anxieties—as usual without commenting, as usual unemotionally and without the slightest sign of impatience. Reynevan had the overwhelming impression, however, that the giant wasn’t the slightest bit interested in the movement of the Builders of the Third Church, or in the cult of the Triple Goddess coming alive again. That he barely attached any importance to the division of history into three epochs. That, all in all, he was quite indifferent as to whether the abbess of the Poor Clares’ convent in White Church believed in and put into practice the theses of the Waldensians and the chiliasts, or if she also leaned towards the doctrines of the Brethren and Sisterhood of the Free Spirit. Samson appeared quite unmoved by the Beghards, Beguines and Guglielmites. While as far as Joachim of Fiore and Meister Eckhart were concerned, Reynevan had the feeling that Samson didn’t give a tinker’s cuss about them.

“I’m going away,” the giant quite unexpectedly announced, having listened politely to Reynevan’s reflections. “You’ll have to cope by yourself. I’m going to Bohemia. To Prague. You were present when I was wounded,” he continued, not waiting for Reynevan to recover from the shock or even utter a word. “You saw what happened when that ball hit my skull. You were a witness; you had the opportunity to see it from close up. I was prepared for something like that. I was told about it and even… Even advised to do it. Axleben in Prague, Rupilius at Trosky. They called it ‘returning through death.’ A means to return to my own universe and to my own… bodily—so to speak—form is to get rid of my present material shell. In short: the simplest way would be to kill this huge body. To destroy it, to permanently interrupt the physiological processes occurring in it. To put an end to its material existence. The spiritual element—my own—would then be liberated and return to its rightful place. That’s what Axleben and Rupilius claimed. What happened on the eighth of May appears to confirm that they were right.