Recovered excerpts from the Bralder Books, circa -1 BCE to present day.
The perversity of my situation is remarkable. The gift I possess yields no reward. I transcend without transcedance. I am the Way but the Way is shut to me.
-I.B. -/8
I perceived a Comet falling from the stars down to Earth. As it fell it burned and became lesser, although its velocity remained frightful, sufficient to penetrate the shell of the Earth and descend into the ashen Realm that is below. And then my Eye beheld a Mountain upon which pre-Human hands had carved an endless stair. The mode of the Stair defied the geometry of the Earth so that its passage went beyond this middle place to where there is a Gate made from two mighty stone pillars.
There was writing drawn on the pillars in plain black letters. The writing on one pillar described things that were Covetous, and on the other pillar the writing was Dreadful. I could not go past this portal because of the desire and the fear that I felt, which presently were as thick cold chains that bound me, each arm ensnared to a pillar. The more I dwelt on the meaning of the words on these pillars, the heavier the chains grew until I believed a special Gravity bound me.
Before I withdrew I was permitted to glimpse what lay beyond the Gate. I thought there was a Figure who sat in serene meditation, whose Prayer was like beams of Radiance coming and going to and from all things that are, or were, or will be. The Figure sat upon a flower. This flower grew up from a holy Ground. I understood that the radiant beams came up out of the Ground, through the flower, out from the Figure according to its prayer, each beam to its certain place among all the times and spaces, and at its appointed time a Radiant Beam returned along the same pathway, and was gathered up into the Figure again, and went down through the flower into that ultimate ground.
As I peered closer I experienced a great shock, for I spied that the Figure was an impossibly intricate machine, and Men attended it. Instantly the plan of it came to me in all its wonderous, blasphemous purity: these Men had built the Machine, there at the end of the universe, and the machine had built the universe at the beginning.
Then the way was shut to me.
-I.B. C/12
I was desperate when I offered him those things. I don't really know if they were in my power to provide, but I offered them anyway. Maybe over some length of time I could have made it happen. He was so close, then, and I could feel it, and I wanted to go too, to escape this endless prison. I wanted it to be over. The alternate worlds didn't experience this...convergence. There weren't any other options. So I told him I'd give him anything. Everything. He said no.
-I.B. A/2
There is a cosmic symmetry in play. It is enormously curious and endlessly fascinating. At that certain time when he offered to a Woman a new route, it was the precise mirror, the pivot, of that earlier Event when I showed to a different Woman a new way. The way back reflects the way outward. So it is, evermore.
-I.B. C/3
All these things I attribute to Yol-daboth of the Pillars, who is the Lord of Pain, to whom I am bound until the unmaking, my unwelcome master.
-I.B. C/5
As he said those words, the curtain was drawn back and I saw him anew.
-I.B. C/1
It chanced that I met a Mathematician whose mind was prodigiously curious. There is a specialness to Mathematics, which is this: mathematics is a language for describing every thought that can be thought. Through questioning I apprehended that this fellow had come to a Question regarding the limits of the maths themselves, and therefore the limits of all Thought. I probed him for awareness of the dead gods, but this had not entered his head, as he was wholly a Materialist. But as for his Question — he was devising a method of describing a number one greater than the largest number. It was the mathematics of infinity. I suggested to the Mathematician that there could very well be a range of these figures, their precise tendrils mapping into the reaches of the infinite, incomparable and coexistent. I gave him a name for these figures.
I do not know wat became of this man.
- I.B. A/7