Charleswg Wrote:Awesome- I love how books can/are woven together.
Now- if you had Jack's Dad serve in the same outfit as Earl Swagger did, I'd flip my lid.

fpw Wrote:from Crisscross:

"It was banned in the fifteenth century by the Catholic Church.”

“Six hundred years . . . pretty old book.”

“That was merely when it was banned. It’s much older than that. No one is quite sure how old. The Compendium first came to the Church’s attention during the Spanish Inquisition when it was discovered in the possession of a Moorish scholar whose name is lost. He was put through unimaginable agonies before he died, but either could not or would not say who had given it to him.

“The Grand Inquisitor himself, Torquemada, is said to have been so repulsed after reading only a part of the Compendium that he ordered a huge bonfire built and hurled the book into the flames. But it would not burn. Nor would it be cut by the sharpest sword or the heaviest ax. So he dropped it into the deepest well in the Spanish Empire; he filled that well with granite boulders, then built a monastery over it.”

Jack gave a low whistle. “What the hell was in it?”

“Many things. Lists and descriptions of unspeakable rites and ceremonies, diagrams of ancient clockwork machines, but the heart of the Compendium is the outline of the Opus Omega—the final process that will assure the ascent of what it calls ‘the Other world.’ ”

Jack felt a chill. “The Otherness. Even back then?”

“Surely you realize that this cosmic shadow war is about far more than humanity. The millions of years since the first hominid reared up on its hind legs are an eye blink in the course of the conflict. It began before the earth was formed and will continue long after the sun’s furnace goes cold.”
Jack did know that—at least he’d been told that—but it was still hard to accept.

“And as with all forbidden things,” Herta went on, “the Compendium could not stay buried. A small subsect of monks within the monastery spent years digging tunnels and secretly excavating the well. They retrieved the book, but before they could put it to use they were all slain and the book disappeared for five hundred years.”

“If a boulder-filled well with a monastery overhead couldn’t keep it out of circulation, where did it hide during those centuries?”

“In a place built by the Ally’s warrior—”

“You mean the one Anya told me about—the one I’m supposed to replace? He’s that old?”

Here was another thing Jack couldn’t or wouldn’t accept: Like it or not, he’d been drafted into this cosmic war.

“Much older,” Herta said. “Almost as old as the Adversary. More than five centuries ago he trapped the Adversary in a stone keep in a remote pass in Eastern Europe. He sealed away many forbidden books there as well, to keep them out of the hands of men and women susceptible to the Otherness. But the fortress was broached by the German Army in the spring of 1941. Fortunately the Adversary was killed—albeit temporarily—before he could escape.”

“But this Compendium thing made it out?”

“Yes. It and other forbidden books ended in the hands of a man named Alexandru, one of the keep’s caretakers. After the war he sold them to an antiquarian book dealer in Bucharest who in turn sold the Compendium to an American collector. A quarter of a century later, the collector was murdered and the book stolen.”

Charleswg Wrote:Awesome- I love how books can/are woven together.
Now- if you had Jack's Dad serve in the same outfit as Earl Swagger did, I'd flip my lid.

APhew Wrote:Maybe F. Paul can get together with Hunter and Child and they can all get drunk and agree to crossover their characters.

fpw Wrote:Too bad I don't drink.