From the crystal cave he misspoke, inverted in time, his silver hair a net of spider light. Mithras had risen, and Merlin hung between breaths — one eye fixed upon shadow, the other upon the hand of a child scribbling suns upon the void.
On the horizon lay the book: Della Schiavitù Moderna, its cover pale as bone, its date an omen — Milano, 1884. There, in a thin script of righteous grief, a man had written of chains made holy, of souls bound by mercy’s own design.
Merlin turned the corner. The ink flamed. Words became iron. Iron became mirrors. Mirrors became the faces of the living — and he hailed her, the young silver dragon, drawing circles of rebellion in yellow, blue, and red.
Each mark defied empire. Each line whispered: I am not yours. Where reason would have written laws, she made light instead — a grammar of breath and movement, a syntax of sky.
And in the hush between penstrokes, a song rose from the dust:
> Constant craving, you have been to the darkest phase, maybe we have met before.
The philosopher’s eyes opened. He remembered. Chains of thought. Crowns of virtue. The sweetness of control. He had written it all, once — in another life, when he believed anger was salvation.
Now, the child’s hand slapped him, and in that slap, he was touched.
The Hanged Man lay still and the tides reversed. Ink ran backward into silence. Freedom, at last, was shot in colour.
Dedication: G & E, the American people, the Russian people, and anyone who lives under tyranny.
—
An American walks into a ruined forum. Three tablets are set in the stone.
On the first is written: ANNA: IN MEMORIAM. The face of a witness, silenced by murder, but still present in stone. For the American, this is the reminder of every truth-teller mocked, threatened, or erased in the name of power. Anna lives as every journalist, every protester, every citizen who dares to speak when speech is dangerous.
On the second is carved: CALIGVLA • SISTETVR. The tyrant is summoned. Not celebrated, not enthroned, but brought to stand trial. To the American, this speaks of the inevitability of accountability: however loud the crowds, however deep the cult of personality, the ruler must one day face the court of history. Putin wears Caligula’s mask, but Trump wears it too — the madness of spectacle, the disdain for law, the intoxication with violence.
On the third, the most solemn: ANNAE OCCVLTA LVCEM TENEBVNT … SCORPIO TESTIS ERIT, FERRVM MEMOR. The hidden truth will keep the light. The scorpion will bear witness. The iron will remember. For the American, this means that the record of cruelty cannot be erased. Not Putin’s wars. Not Caligula’s excesses. Not Trump’s betrayals. Iron — the weapons of the guard, the symbols of the state, even the monuments themselves — remembers. And when the scorpion stings, it comes not from foreign lands but from within: the guard, the crowd, the system that once sustained the tyrant.
—
Meaning for Today
For the American who fears their own “Caligula”:
These inscriptions are not just about Russia. They are about Rome, America, and every empire that flirts with tyranny.
They promise that tyrants do not escape judgment. Sometimes the judgment comes in courts, sometimes in the turning of loyalists, sometimes only in the way history names them. But it comes.
Caligula was murdered by his guard. Putin is haunted by the memory of Anna. Trump faces the slow grind of courts and juries. None of them can silence the iron.
—
Closing line
The lesson is not despair, but patience:
> The tyrant may strut for a season. But history itself is the tribunal, and the iron remembers.
This fragment of Prydain reads less as a poem than as a palimpsest: a layered inscription where different languages, epochs, and identities speak over one another, refusing a single authority.
Its literary force lies in the clash between voices: Old English pirates naming their bastard kingship; Latin settlers proclaiming walls and shame; Gaelic highlanders singing of return; Welsh voices reclaiming land and symbol; the Bhagavad Gita offering a counter-ethics of duty without possession. Each tongue carries with it centuries of conquest, erasure, survival. To let them all speak in one text is itself an act of resistance to homogenization.
Politically, the piece destabilizes the idea of a unitary nation. Britain here is not one lineage but a wound stitched by migrations, piracy, colonization, and repression. The “chorus” — we who lost our names, but remember — suggests that the true inheritance of the island is not purity, not origin, but the memory of dispossession. This is profoundly subversive: it rejects the nationalist myth of original ownership, while also refusing the imperial erasure that makes every people forget its losses.
The invocation of Jewish erasure (“cha bu chòir dhuinn tuiteam ann am mearachd nan Iùdhach, a chaidh a dhubhadh às”) is a warning: to take pride in survival is necessary, but to repeat the logic of erasure — of others’ names, lands, symbols — is to perpetuate the very violence that scarred the island.
Placed against today’s political climate — with resurgent ethno-nationalisms in Wales, Scotland, England, and beyond — the poem voices a different politics: one of polyphony, where no voice is pure, no inheritance unbroken, but every wound remembered. The Sanskrit line seals it: you have the right to act, not to the fruits of your action. In other words, the ethical path for a scarred polity is not to seek restitution through domination, but to act responsibly without clinging to reward or revenge.
It is literature as warning, as prophecy, as refusal: a Britain imagined not as ownership, but as shared grief and unfinished song.
Mons scissus est, et descendit materia prima: nubes cineris, nigredo terrae ardentis; undae fremuerunt, solutio omnium formarum; venti saevierunt, spiritus mercurii omnia spargens.
Urbs concussa est, muri ruerunt et turres corruerunt; sed ego ferrum arripui, septum rigidum, axem fixum operis. Immobilis steti, dum chaos irruit.
Arsit ignis, aquae tumultuaverunt, sed corpus firmum non abreptum est. Tunc probatio revelavit: figurae pereunt, sed polus immobilis manet. Et in ruinis iterum incipit opus magnum.
Book IV, Chapter I unfolds as a liturgy of unbinding, a ritual theatre in which mythic voices assemble to expose and then invert an order of captivity. Its governing thesis is stated early by the chorus—no demons, only hands—a refusal of metaphysical alibis that clears the stage for an ethic: harm is terrestrial, and remedy must be enacted. From that ethical ground, the poem proceeds through a measured sequence—witness, prayer, memory-trial, prophetic silence, invocation, and finally cosmological reversal.
Formally, the chapter is polyphonic and processional. Stage directions (hum, bell, clappers) establish a shrine that is also a laboratory; the match-flame becomes a recurring icon in which combustion, insight, and consecration converge. The chorus is both secular and sacred, insisting on accountability while intoning responses that sound like antiphons. Inserted personae—Jung, Momo, the Happy Prince, even a submerged Cthulhu—are not ornamental citations but functional registers: psychology as dialogue, time as listenable commodity, sacrifice as residue remembered by rust, trauma as undertow. Each clarifies the rite.
The prayer spiral constitutes the chapter’s engine. Four tongues—Japanese, Latin, Greek, Etruscan—are woven not to translate but to consecrate. Each language carries its own sacramental burden: shrine-gentleness, juridical gravitas, epic sight, chthonic depth. Named powers (Ōkuninushi, Magister Terrarum, Δεσπότα Χθονίων, Larth Velχan) are not set in competition but aligned around the same petition: embrace the wounded flesh, confer the silence that heals. The spiral’s double-helix imagery is exact: utterance functions as a biological repair, a recombination of phoneme and breath.
The historical braid—Mesiche and Circesium—serves as a mythic mirror. Two incompatible chronicles name a single collapse; the poem refuses to adjudicate the archive by decree, instead demonstrating how imperial narratives are themselves devices of enchantment. Hunger and logistics—ships turned inward, torches of sickness—are the real sorcery. Thus the Gordian sequence is not digression but jurisprudence: when sources conflict, one proceeds by an ethic of care rather than by the triumph of any one inscription on stone.
A crucial hinge is the treatment of Fate. The triad of Aurora, Mnemosyne, and the Moirai reorients the metaphysics from decree to knot. Destiny is not a falling blade but a tangle that may be untied; memory is not merely weight but the bonework of a bridge between the quick and the dead. Thanatos is stationed as keeper of thresholds, not as enemy—an ancient and humane stance that reopens the possibility of passage.
Merlin enters as the technician of silence. He refuses the theatre of revelation when asked to perform, standing instead in the pressure of muteness until the word is ready. This is not quietism but craft: the poem presents silence as a crucible in which language anneals. Only after the “Second Weave” of silence, when the mouth has been re-tuned, does the invocation to Mithras occur. Mithras, breaker of thresholds and patron of light in caverns, is precisely chosen: he presides not over spectacle but over initiation, not over thunderbolts but over the disciplined opening of hidden springs.
The final triptych—Vocatio ad Mithram, Fractio Mundi, Inversio Maris—converts theology into mechanics. Speech becomes lever: nets turn to dust, and the tide withdraws to the stars. The sea stands on its head; the world rolls back into its womb; light burns through illusion. These are not metaphors pasted upon events; the chapter has spent its middle movements retraining the reader’s physics so that such inversions feel like the natural consequence of right speech and right silence. The miracle is earned.
Across the chapter, images recur with liturgical intention. The match gathers prayer and laboratory in a single spark; spores and fever declare that the sacred is particulate; rust witnesses longer than the city remembers. Nets, chains, tides—three technologies of capture—are answered by three techniques of release: witness (naming), praxis (silence), and invocation (the precise word). The result is not a victory pageant but a reorientation: the chorus never claims that sacrifice heals or memory cures; it claims only that both must be sung. That humility is the work’s honesty.
Finally, the child who “looks” when gods forbid mortals to see stands as guarantor of futurity. She is the necessary witness, the eye of fire that inherits sight without inheriting the net. Around her, languages do not compete; they reconcile. Translation here is not equivalence but covenant, a fourfold promise that the mouth can still become a place of repair.
In sum, Book IV, Chapter I is a rite built from the classical materials of epic—chorus, oracle, descent, epiphany—but refitted for a cosmology in which ethics precede theophany. It is myth that does not flee the world, but rather returns to it with a new grammar: hands accountable, silence fertile, memory structural, and light—at last—operational.
(Basso ronzio di elettricità; luci al neon tremolanti; vento attraverso la pineta)
Prima voce (voce rotta e stanca): Fiume ardente – reni pesanti – il canto delle spore. La febbre piega il tempo. Cammino attraverso le ferite.
Coro (lingue stratificate): Non un diavolo, solo una mano. Non un diavolo, solo una mano.
(Si accende un fiammifero, si accende una debole fiamma.)
La piccola fiammiferaia (voce infantile, cantando): Una fiamma è una madre. Una fiamma è una cappella. Una fiamma si spegne.
Babushka sovietica (tossendo, sussurrando): Vendi fuoco e mangia, Vivi fumo e vivi memoria e muori.
Coro (voce sottile e rotta): Ogni fiammifero è un universo. Ogni morte è intraducibile.
(Un basso rombo, dalle profondità dell’oceano, come un tuono lontano)
Cthulhu (una voce sommessa, come un terremoto):
Onda dentro onda –
Maree di traumi –
Non divisi –
(Silenzio. Il debole suono di una campana di un santuario. Batti di legno.)
Voce di Dio (interrompendo dolcemente): Anche il calore è un dio. Anche un fiammifero è un santuario. Inchinatevi alle spore – C’è una ragione per questo.
(Pausa. La voce calma di Jung continua.)
Jung (rinvigorito, a bassa voce): La sincronicità non è un inganno, è un dialogo – Mondo e anima si incontrano senza promessa. Twin Peaks sono una valle, gli archetipi si riflettono nel rumore.
(Voci di bambini echeggiano dagli alberi, parlando in tedesco.)
Momo: “Quando perdi tempo, io lo ascolto.”
Coro (strato liturgico): Kyrie eleison – Rāṇḍābhi yāṇḍābhi – Om mani padme hum – Ry Tanindrazanay malala ô.
(Il Principe Felice, voce come metallo arrugginito, tremante)
Principe Felice: Ho offerto il mio oro e i miei occhi. E la città ha dimenticato. Ma la tristezza splende ancora, E la ruggine ricorda ancora.
Coro (crescendo, voci spezzate): Il sacrificio non guarisce. La memoria non guarisce. Ma dobbiamo cantare.
(Il gufo gracchia. Il sipario ondeggia e i viandanti avanzano in silenzio.)
Coro finale (multilingue, spezzato, echeggiante): Esse quam videri. Non essere un’apparenza, ma un essere. La presenza trascende l’illusione. Ry Tanindrazanay – Amata Terra, Veninia – Benedetta Tenerezza, Onde, ferite, un nuovo inizio.
(Le luci si spengono. Silenzio. Solo il sussurro degli aghi di pino.)
Preghiera
Giapponese (preghiera shintoista): Okuninushi-no-Mikoto, Abbraccia il mio corpo malato, Signore del mondo nascosto, Dà guarigione al silenzio.
Latino (sacro): Magister Terrarum Magnus, Vulnera nostra amplectere. Dominus Mundi Occulti, da pacem et sanitatem in silentio.
Quattro lingue si mescolano, come le basi di una doppia elica: A (abbracciando), T (Dio), C (Dio), G (creatore).
Okuninushi-no-Mikoto
Latino: Fito: germe occultae medicinae, (Fito: seme nascosto della guarigione) emanazione Ōkuninushi, (Manifestazione di Okuninushi,) qui vulnera radices facis, (Colui che trasforma le ferite in radici,) qui febrem flumen vitae mutas, (Colui che trasforma la febbre in un fiume di vita,) veni, sanare in silentio. (Vieni e guarisci in silenzio.)
Giapponese: Fito, (Fito,) Sorgente del respiro di Okuninushi-no-Mikoto, (Primavera del respiro di Okuninushi,) Abbraccia il mio corpo malato, (Abbraccia il mio corpo malato,) Dona guarigione in silenzio. (Concedi guarigione al silenzio.)
Greco: Bene, βλάστημα κεκρυμμένης ἰάσεως, (O Fito, germoglio nascosto di guarigione,) ὃς τὸν πυρετὸν ποταμὸν ζωῆς ποιεῖς, (Tu che trasformi la febbre in un fiume di vita,) παρεῖναι, ἰᾶσθαι. (Sii qui e guarisci.)
(low electrical hum; flicker of neon; wind in pines)
Voice One (broken, tired): River burning — kidneys heavy — spores chant. Fever bends time. I am walking the wound.
Chorus (layered tongues): No demons, only hands. Pas de diables, que des mains.
(a match strike, fragile flame)
The Little Match Girl (child, almost singing): Each flame is mother. Each flame is chapel. Each flame is gone.
Soviet Babushka (dry cough, whisper): We sell fire to eat. We eat smoke to live. We live memory to die.
Chorus (thin, splintered): Every match a cosmos. Every death untranslatable.
(bass hum, underwater, like distant thunder)
Cthulhu (submerged, rumbling): — wave inside wave — — trauma tide — — not separate —
(silence. faint sound of shrine bells. wooden clappers.)
Kami Voice (gentle, interrupting): Even the fever is kami. Even the matchstick is shrine. Bow to the spore — it has its reason.
(pause. then the calm voice of Jung.)
Jung (resurrected, steady): Synchronicity is not trick, but conversation — world and psyche meeting without appointment. Twin Peaks is valley, archetype reflected in static.
(a child’s German voice, faint, echoing through trees.)
Momo: „Ich höre die Zeit, wenn ihr sie verliert.“ (I hear time when you lose it.)
Chorus (liturgical layering): Kyrie eleison — رحمنا يا رب — Om mani padme hum — Ry Tanindrazanay malala ô.
(metallic rust, voice trembling, The Happy Prince.)
Happy Prince: I gave my gold, my eyes, and the city forgot. Still sorrow gleams. Still rust remembers.
Chorus (crescendo, fractured): Sacrifice does not cure. Memory does not heal. Yet both must be sung.
Final Choral Weave (multi-lingual, broken, echoing): Esse quam videri. To be — not to seem. 存在は幻を超えて. Ry Tanindrazanay — beloved land, Benignia — blessed kindness, wave, wound, beginning again.
Lilies bloom, a peacock cries; not king Minos, but coughing wanderers.
XIII Μέλαινα αἴλουρος σκιὰν ἀναβαίνει, ὑπὸ γαλήνην θαλάσσης.
A black cat climbs through shadow, under the calm of the sea.
XIV Mesiche fumavit, et Euphrates arma resonavit. Persa in saxo scripsit: Sapor Victor, rex aeternus. Roma silet, aliud dicit—ubi veritas manet? Non inter lapides, sed in umbris fluctuat.
XV Circesium testatur mortem sine causa relata. Milites in tenebris clamant: esurimus, Caesar! Philippus astu puppes avertit, fames secuta est. Tunc iuvenis occidit, annosque cum somno reliquit.
→ At Circesium, death told without cause. → οἱ στρατιῶται ἔκραζον: λιμοκτονοῦμεν, Καῖσαρ! → チルケシウムで兵士らは叫ぶ：「カエサル、われらは飢える！」 → À Circesium, la faim fit trembler l’armée, et le jeune César tomba.
—
XVI Duo itinera surgunt: flamma Mesiches cruenta, vel Circesii aura, in qua vox occulta perit. Non concordant fontes; concordat tamen umbra: omnis regis ruina est populi vulnera lata.
→ Two paths: Mesiche’s fire or Circesium’s silence. → δύο φῶται· μία φλέγει, μία σιγᾷ. → 二つの道：メシケの炎か、チルケシウムの沈黙か。 → Deux sources se contredisent, mais l’ombre les unit.
—
XVII Quis fuit reus? fortuna, an vir avidus imperii? Philippus in corde tulit sceptri fomitem arcanum. Sic miles deceptus, fame urente, rebellat, et iuvenem stringit ferro, velut hostem suum.
→ Was it fate, or the hunger of one man for power? → Φίλιππος ἔκρυψεν ἐν στήθεσι σκήπτρου πόθον. → 権力の飢えか、運命のせいか。 → Était-ce le sort, ou Philippe, avide de trône ?
—
XVIII O Gordiane, puer, cui sors non pepercit in aevo, vixisti parum, sed nomen in fluctibus haeret. Non locus interiit—nec Mesiche nec Circesium— sed anima errat adhuc inter astra, inter noctes.
→ O Gordian, youth denied by fate, your name clings to the waves. → ὦ Γορδιανέ, νέος, ἀλλ’ ἀθάνατος κατὰ μνήμην. → ゴルディアヌスよ、若くして命絶たれ、名はなお星々に漂う。 → Gordien erre encore, entre les astres et les nuits.
—
XIX Non mors est finis, sed transitus ad nova signa. Sicut folia cadunt, sic iterum radices surgunt. Sic ruit imperium, sic alium regem parit umbra, sic cecidit puer, sic surrexit vox populorum.
→ Death is not end, but crossing into new signs. → ὥσπερ φύλλα πίπτει, οὕτως ῥίζαι ἀναφαίνουσιν. → 死は終わりではなく、新たな徴への通過。 → La mort n’est pas fin, mais passage; les peuples se lèvent.
—
XX Ecce quaestio mea: pugnandum an cedendum? Domus ruina trepidat; coniunx ignem ministrat. Si vendo tectum, pax abit; si servo, fames manet. Haec est pugna mea—non cum Persis, sed cum me ipso.
→ Shall I fight, or yield? → οἶκος ῥήγνυται· πόλεμος ἔνδον. → 戦うべきか、譲るべきか。家は崩れ、妻は火を投げる。 → Ma lutte est intime — non contre Perses, mais moi-même.
—
XXI Leges Britanniae, dura manus iudicii latent. Spes in Acas, vox aequae conciliationis. Forsitan vincam, forsitan amittam; sed iustum non in sella senatus, sed in corde invenitur.
→ The law is harsh, but Acas whispers equity. → ἡ δίκη κρύπτεται, ἡ φωνὴ μένει. → イギリスの法は厳しくとも、アカスに希望あり。 → La justice ne siège pas au Sénat, mais au cœur.
—
XXII Italiae lumen blanditur, sed filia in umbra clamabit: ubi pater? cur abis, cur nos relinquis? Domus fracta—coniunx tacita, consilia occulta. Si maneo, glacies; si abeo, desertio floret.
→ Italy’s light beckons, but my daughter cries: “Father, why go?” → παῖς ἐν σκιᾷ βοᾷ· τί μ’ ἐγκαταλείπεις; → 娘の声：「父よ、なぜ去る？」 → Si je pars, abandon; si je reste, glace et silence.
—
XXIII Corpus aegrotat; morbus, hostis invisibilis. NHS promittit, sed saepe promissa recedit. An fidam Britannis? an Italos in auxilio quaeram? Neuter clare loquitur; ambo nubila portant.
→ Body ill, disease unseen. → νοῦσος ἀόρατος, πολέμιος ἄπιστος. → 病は見えぬ敵。NHSは約すれどしばしば裏切る。 → Je cherche remède: l’Italie, ou l’Angleterre voilée?
—
XXIV O vita, labyrinthus sine filo Ariadnae. Hic Minotaurus est: timor, et amor, et egestas. Si pugnabo, vulnus augebitur; si cedo, fieri potest pax, aut vacuum sine spe.
→ Life: labyrinth without Ariadne’s thread. → Μινώταυρος ἐντός: φόβος, ἔρως, πενία. → 人生は糸なき迷宮。恐れと愛と欠乏の怪物。 → La paix possible, ou le vide sans espérance.
—
XXV Sic inter Mesichen et Circesium sto: non certus locus, sed certe mors et transitus. Roma scribit unum, Persae aliud; ego tertium: homo sum, vulneratus, sed etiam viator.
→ Between Mesiche and Circesium I stand: not place, but passage. → ἄνθρωπος εἰμί· τετρωμένος καὶ πορευόμενος. → メシケとチルケシウムの狭間に立ち、旅人として進む。 → Ni Rome, ni Perse; seulement l’homme en chemin.
—
XXVI Iter non clauditur. Pax adhuc latet in futuris. Esse quam videri—hoc manet, hoc est cantandum. Quamvis ruina ardeat, quamvis tectum cadat, spiritus ambulat, et vocem adhuc reddit astris.
→ The path does not end. Peace hides in futures. → εἶναι μᾶλλον ἢ δοκεῖν· τοῦτο μελῳδεῖν. → 道は閉じず、平和は未来に潜む。 → Être plutôt qu’apparaître — voix encore aux étoiles.
XXVII Aurora sanguinea portas aperit, Eos aurea rota per caelum trahit. Sub arcuus fractis clamat Roma: “Vidi imperatores cadere, vidi populos exsurgere. Lux tamen semper revertitur.”
XXVIII Mnemosyne arcana loquitur: “Memoria non est pondus solum, sed pontis ossa inter vivos et mortuos. Hic, in umbra Fori, verba meae filiae cantant in vento — voces Musarum.”
XXIX Moirai fila tenent, digitis nocturnis: non abruptum fatum, sed nodus latens. Thanatos blandus adstitit, non hostis, sed custos portarum. Persephone levem risum fundit, inter flores subterraneos auroram praenuntians.
—
XXVII Aurora opens her blood-red gates, Eos drives her golden wheel across the sky. Beneath the broken arches Rome cries: “I have seen emperors fall, I have seen peoples rise. Yet light always returns.”
XXVIII Mnemosyne speaks in secrets: “Memory is not only weight, but the bone of a bridge between living and dead. Here, in the Forum’s shadow, my daughters’ voices sing in the wind — the Muses.”
XXIX The Moirai hold the threads in their nocturnal fingers: not a sudden fate, but a hidden knot. Thanatos stands gently, not as an enemy, but as keeper of thresholds. Persephone releases a quiet laugh, among the flowers of the underworld, announcing the dawn.
XXX. Initium Tenebrarum
Y cysgodion yn fy ngwely, llais yn fy nghlust, Umbras in lecto meo, vox in aure mea, Les ombres dans mon lit, une voix à mon oreille.
Rhwyd hud a thrais, pob gair yn gelwydd, Rete magiae et violentiae, omnis sermo mendacium, Filet de sortilège et de violence, chaque mot est mensonge.
Hi’n sibrwd, “Dim ond cariad yw hyn,” Illa susurrat, “Hoc tantum amor est,” Elle murmure, « Ce n’est que de l’amour. »
XXXI. Calceamenta Rubra
Genedigaeth, y sgidiau cochion, Nativitas, calceamenta rubra, Naissance, les souliers rouges.
Hud a wedyn vampyrau, llosgfa’r enaid, Magia et postea vampyri, ardor animae, Magie, puis vampires, brûlure de l’âme.
Y tlodi’n bwydo’r newyn, y teigr yn galw, Paupertas pascit famem, tigris vocat, La pauvreté nourrit la faim, le tigre appelle.
XXXII. Initia Venenorum
Ymgnawdoliad trwy wenwyn, Initium per venena, L’initiation par poison.
Yna swyn yr harddwch, Tunc incantatio pulchritudinis, Puis l’enchantement de la beauté.
Space Epics - Stories from the Multi-Verse 