Welcome, traveler. It gratifies me that you have found this place, and this volume, however long it may have been since I sat down to write it. The longer the more gratifying, in fact; I flatter myself that my little work may have effects for some modest time beyond my own existence in this plane.
I have built this comfortable house, as a repository for this and my other volumes of writing, at the confluence of many channels on multiple levels of reality. This may not have much meaning to you, but again I flatter myself with the notion that at least some of my readers, some of those that reach this place and this page through the layers of time and space that make up the universes, will come already possessing some knowledge of these matters, however esoteric. These places have always drawn certain people; it may be that you are one of them.
And if not already conversant, you may find this knowledge in the other volumes that I have stored in this snug cellar, such as my The Degrees Of Reality, and my Notes On Those Who Gather.
In brief, this house is constructed over a great intersection of this world’s leys, lines of semantic or immanent energy leading through the flesh of the ground, which correspond to major trunks in the great mycelial network that underlies the world. It is a truism that every world which is host to life, inevitably has such an underlying network, uniting each part into the unavoidable whole, and that individual lives on each world are influenced, to whatever degree, by the form of that network and the energies that through it course.
Further, this world itself, the world called by the ancients Cuer da Verai, lies at the center of a vast confluence of star-channels, those connections weakly guessed at by the first astrologers, and centuries later confirmed by Les Physiciennes and their gravity-wave telescopes and gauge field equations. So the delicate hyphae tendrils of the holy saprophytes carry thought through the mycelia to the earth node, the earth node resonates with the stellar node, and truth flows onward to every world and star beyond, touching every life between and within.
Do you begin to understand, traveler? To comprehend this place, cet tere, that you have reached? I wonder, as I sit and pen these words, whether it is more likely that you have come knowingly seeking that which you have found, or if you have wandered here by chance, and if so whether you will be able to appreciate your good fortune. The more I have come to understand these matters, the more I have come to believe that whoever and whatever you are, reading these words, your presence here has meaning beyond coincidence or meaningless chance. Perhaps others have been drawn here as well; I am gratified in contemplating the meetings that may occur here, between les meslieres, those who gather.
I must ask you to follow me through one more gateway of wisdom. You are in the circuit of a great joining of the earthly and stellar webs; now, know that you are also in the circuit of those still greater webs that join one reality to another, one universe to other universes, one possibility to all else that has been, that is, and that may yet be. As the hyphae connect in the great fungal network, and les vrilles d’étoiles span the vastnesses between the stars, so each reality extends tendrils, threads of existence, into the interstices, across the dimensions, between the realities, and those threads twine and connect in the great infinitum rete universale that finally links every smallest thought of the humblest creature on the most distant planetoid in the emptiest universe, to the heart of the greatest Empress in the most glorious city in all the realities.
And in such a place, which I have journeyed and studied so long to find, what enterprises, what stories, what contes gaiantes, might not begin, or end?
Next, to the house itself. I have built it in this place using means of my own, and linked it to the universal flow of time; the means are of no concern. But if you find the house in disarray, or seemingly touched by the years, avail yourself of the apparatus in the lowest level of the cellars, and it may be restored to good order without trouble. I expect that the nature of the location and its good virtues will make neglect a rare thing, but still I take precautions. I would have it that this house of mine might outlast anything else in this universe that has come from my hand.
Another thing that you must know. Although the interstices between the realities do not exist, outside of the infinitum rete of connecting tendrils that pass through them, they are despite the fact inhabited. How a place, a reaume, may be inhabited when it does not exist, is a subtle topic for which I refer you once again to my modest volume The Degrees Of Reality. But for our purposes here, you need only know this as a brute fact, and know additionally that these inhabitants include a variety of being yclept Interstice Hawks. Like terrestrial hawks, les oisel de proie dez champs ancienz, the Interstice Hawks are fast and wild, cutting through the non-existence of their realm as our hawks cut through the air, glorious and mad.
You may not ride an Interstice Hawk, the notion is itself an oxymoron. But with the aid of certain esoteric formulae and procedures, for which I refer you to my Notes On Those Who Gather, their comings and goings may at times be predicted, and the bold practitioner may synchronize hier own energies with that of the Hawk, and in this wise gain knowledge, and travel to realms, hitherto unimagined in the wildest dreams of humankind. This is my final gift to you in this brief page, traveler, and I bid you use it with the greatest care. I myself have flown with the Interstice Hawks perhaps a dozen times, and after each flight I found myself not only wiser, but changed. Perhaps only a fool or a foux would attempt it, but who is to say what is foolishness, and what is wisdom, when we stand at the edge of so many secrets?
ceoln 