DEDICATION
Those who tread their lives unerring, who work and who sleep and who think the one Thought: envy them! For they know not the burden of the true reality. Those who watch and rule, the nervous overseers who plot and who gloat and who speak the one Word: battle them! For they are consumed by the verity of their own vision. Those who would destroy out of hand that wrought by the work and toil of others: hate them! For they serve the only real Enemy. Those who have not the strength to start out upon the Path, who listen and who learn and who seek only what lies in their means: love them! For they shall not be destroyed by their own folly. Those who give voice to the vile and the blasphemous, who smirk and who mock and who dart here and fro 'bout the courts of sanity: humour them! For only they can tear us from the stagnant solace of our own beliefs. And those who tread the jagged path 'tween light and darkness, who shatter their humanity with Truth, who battle with their very souls 'gainst the hordes of Infinity to win knowledge from Her tainted lair: pity them! For they shall never find respite.

                S E V E N   B L A C K   P E A R L S
                                or,
               the testimony of Maloch the Chelnicean

Epistle to Caellote
	With these words I charge thee, my pen, my muse, to watch
over my words and guide them, to let them stray not from the paths of understanding, to veil their lore from those whose eyes are unable to judge their worth. For there are many that seek to read these words, and many more that aim to destroy them; yet few there are that have earned the knowledge contained herein. Let me say now that hesoever has not tasted fully the fruits of the Tree of Life, who has not plunged to the vilest depths of Vice and mounted the loftiest peaks of Virtue, who has not lived and lied and bled, not ruled and loved and fled, not killed and prayed and plead--He, who has not wrung from his life every last dram of vivid experience, He has not proved worthy of the hard-bought wisdom I wrested from the very Core of the World. Shield his eyes then, goddess of poesy and cipher, imbue my script with the blinds vital to the sanity of all but the true Denizens of the Path.
	Therefore and let this serve as a True and Real warning to the unwary and theunlearned, the foolhardy and the ambitious: the life of man is but a frail thing indeed, and the peaceful life more frail still. Seek not to know that which has not been prepared for you, lest the tortuous life you lead become but the faintest of longed-after memories. The world contains a truth in and of itself that is far less taxing than the Truth of the nether lands, a truth contained in every shimmering sunset, in the smiles of good company and the body of good wine: a truth that wanes before the fearful Truth as the flame of a candle fades before the sun.


	The time for my tale is come. It is now thirteen pairings of the twin-moon that I have drawn breath into my accursed frame, though by guile and nerve I have stolen back ten of them. The wintery cold that I am yet still growing accustomed to has set in, and the winds are right. The world is halfway through its 300 million-annum arc round the nexus of the spiral, say the natural philosophers, the intellectual consorts of alchemists and astrologers. Contemporary dictum marks this as the forty-first annum after the end of the Reign of Herrum Ghar, and the fall of his Pendran Empire; the priests mark this as the fifth winter after the First Millenium since the gods left.
	The gods. Yes, I know the gods. I've brawled with Foltan and duelled with Messre, gambled with Tack and paid homage to the enticing Fiera, even drank the night with mighty Tzor and pilfered a few draughts to quench the thirst of Leten in his icy prison and listened raptly to his tales of inhuman rebellion. The gods are not as they seem, stripped of their earthly followers; indeed, often as not they are more Human than those whose minds they awe.
	But the gods were not with me at the start of my journey; then they were absent, along with wealth and trust and friends and peace. At the time I was young in years and in mind; I was but two month's journey from the Killean steppes where I had trained under the most disciplined minds our race has to offer, and Fortune's dice were wreaking from me my payment.
	The grasslands of Russin were where I laid my tired body down to die, surrounded by endless game whose flesh was poison to mine own. For seven days I was reduced to the deepest of trance states, the mottled sheen of a single pebble holding my gaze in that cavern amidst the scarlet-hued brambles. The stepping breath of five counts brought me a into stillness of the surface mind whereupon I was able to reduce my consciousness to a state beyond physical concerns. The world became as a vast colorless limbo, a clouded realm pierced not by the sun at its stabbing zenith nor by the moons in their soothing arcs: a wasteland within.
	And the great bird of death came for me, its black scythe-like wings whipping through the worlds in a relentless glacial flourish as it alighted upon me, the beat of my heart slowing to the declining measure of the steeled feathers until at last it ceased, and the bird spread its wings above me and sunk its oily beak in my chest. The sharp-planed wings beat again their unearthly cadence and the winds blew bitter and cold about me as the bird launched into the starless sky, its glass-scaled talons wrenching me from my mortal roost like a sightless worm being plucked from the new day's earth.
	Together we shot off into the boundless night, that bird and I; past the rim of galaxies and into the blueblack void through which the Unseen travel. The icy, brackish wind of the bird's framework wings brought the only illusion of travel to that sightless, formless ring; the shadowed feathers cut the air about me like scorched metal ribbons, paring metallic whines and screeches from the still air that fired within me a longing for the ears with which to block my hearing.
	The bird gripped my severed soul with the granite hold of the unliving; its blue-violet talons, sharpened on the walls of countless transcendant spheres, could plunge into the heart of a still-living sun and draw the nova core forth unflinching. Yet still I fought, writhing and rending and tearing and biting until at last I slipped from the bird's grip like a lost meal just before it passed the Threshold. On and on I fell, over and over, my exultant will unable to end my screams as I realized that suddenly there was nothing against which to push.
	For eon after eon I drifted at the mercy of etheric winds, buffeted by the goings of unfathomable beings whose merest glance broke the fevered pitch of my shrieks.