No, I don’t care. I don’t care. No. Forget it, it’s over. It’s done with. This is how it’s going to be, you can’t change that, you may as well live with it.

Let me say first and clearly: I have little patience for mystics and priests. Charlatans and hypocrites, the lot of them – if they aren’t damning your undying soul to a private hell, they’re under indictment for pederasty or usury or indulging in some panegoism or other. Let the dead care for the dead; it gives them something to do.

Above us spins the Celestial Firmament, as is well-established (see BASIC COSMOLOGY), and as is equally well-established, at irregular intervals, several times a year, a baetyl event occurs. The stuff of the Firmament decays and a bit falls off. When this happens, the baetyl (a chunk of Firmament usually about the size of a melon) plunges through the void, down to earth, ex lapis, and ninety percent of the time it hits the Sea of Creation and sinks and that’s that.

(I suppose some enterprising soul might dive into the sea and find the baetyl and haul it up, but lord, looking for a rock at the bottom of the ocean? I know I have better things to do with my time.)

The other ten percent of the time, the baetyl lands where it can be tracked and recovered. Runners dispatched, maybe a little poaching if the baetyl landed in your neighbor’s duchy instead of yours, whatever. The point is someone gets ahold of the baetyl, and then the fun begins.

If by “fun” you mean “tapping the matrix of magical energy stored within the baetyl and drawing out its magical power to energize you,” I mean. It’s not for everyone. Tried it once myself, with a baetyl given me by my great-uncle as a present. Never again. For three hours everything I looked at burst into flame and I kept falling through the floor… and for two weeks afterwards I couldn’t sleep properly.

First-year students always ask why someone – Ol-Rasta the Silver Marquise or some of the Gold Leaf members or, prior to his untimely untimeliness, Hel-Morrid the Clockworker – why someone doesn’t go up there, to the Firmament itself, and just mine baetyl after baetyl after baetyl, eat their power, and become as to a god. We tell them the same thing each time: if you think you can avoid the Smelter of Souls, then try it yourself. That shuts them up, usually.

SEE ALSO: Basic Cosmology, Hel-Morrid the Clockworker, the Smelter of Souls