July 22, 1988
Preparations for enacting the Clergyman’s Weave have not proceeded according to the due haste which this realm so desperately requires. Without the chronospatial readings of the interregnum needle, I am left with no recourse but to depend upon that which is the death of schema much less lacking in scope than the present: guesswork. Must it end like this?
Ransacking my curios from happier times (even if that happiness was illusory, at best), I come once more upon the Lover’s Dulcimer. Hammering a simple melody to calm my rusted nerves of steel, a response began to play.
Blame me if you must, devoting space to recording what transpired when I could be focusing what remains of my once legendary mental prowess upon the catastrophe at hand. There is calm in this activity of recording that I so desperately need right now. It is familiar, an action of which I have partaken many times in the past. (Too many? I could have acted… saved him…)
The dulcimer spoke of a young girl’s love for an old man. He eventually married her and locked her away in the house that is now the source//solution to the Grand Deferment. This girl grew to be a happy woman, never aware of her captivity. We never are. Not here. She played the harpsichord and grew a splendid garden of fain roses and other herbs.
Missing her husband, who was frequently away, she wove. Was it her grief that summoned the illustrium magnus to this wild nexus of the occult? Was it the high quality tools that he presented to her, a gift from his fraternal organization? And the prick-marks on her fingers that went unreported upon her death – Ezio mentioned them. Why did the unawakened press overlook this bit of ghastly trivia?
It can’t be... If I am wrong, then I will not write in here again.
(Source: Torn from the private diary of Dr. Orlando Laswell. Discovered by Caleb Drab within the false bottom of a Chinese puzzle box filled with Denri Butterfly pollen.)