ANDERS MAGE PAGE 2.0

Blazing light of thousand suns,
the red light district
is where we go - but the wave
will crash against the walls.
Reborn.
Train.
Delta arc strap,
but heighten can innate codas.

Some books are more precious than their owners realize. The Nonalalia is a thin volume of poetry written by an unknown author under the pseudonym "Orpheus". Its slightly dated mock-leather cover make it look pretentious rather than beautiful.

The nine long poems in the Nonalalia are unusual and disturbing. Most readers don't understand anything, and soon dismiss the thin volume as pointless avant-garde literature. Yet many mages react immediately when they hear the haunting nonsense poetry. It describes the Spheres of magick in a very strange way. Each poem relates to one Sphere, and seems to link it with strange concepts and ideas. Some mages claim that meditating on the poems give them new insights into Sphere magick.

The truth is more subtle. The poems are not just visions of the Spheres, but paths through the High Umbra. By reading and understanding a poem in the Umbra, the mage can gradually follow a path to the Shard Realm of the Sphere the poem describes, and perhaps even further into the Shade Realm of the Sphere. This alone would make the book precious to those who knew its secret, but it holds further secrets of another order. If a mage shifts poems when he is in the correct Shard Realm (or Shade Realm), he can follow the associations to the realm of the other Sphere — a very surprising fact which implies some quite strange things about the topology of the Umbra.

By carefully studying hints and allusions in the poetry, mages who understand these lesser secrets will come to a startling conclusion: there is a certain path through the Umbrae between the Spheres and the Earth, which allows the mage to follow the Great Cycle not only metaphorically, but also physically. What this means is very unclear, but according to alchemical doctrines completing such a quest would at least correspond to a great purification of the mage's being, possibly Ascension. The Great Cycle can also be followed in the opposite direction...