And when the lint of man’s hate meets the strewn crumbs of his fear,
and when it rises upon man in retribution for his shortsightedness,
they who see the future will send one of their own
to save man from his folly and beat the future into his thick, collective skull.
-The Lady in the Closet
Generally considered a sort of mild, public menace by the various underworlds of London, the so called Lady of the Lamps made it her mission in life to study the secret lives of those people, who for one reason or another, preferred to keep their lives secret.
The next printmaking project, then. Photo process is awfully fun if you do everything in Illustrator anyway.
My first printmaking project that looked any good, based on an image I have not been able to get out of my head since reading Homer.
This is a classic example of calligramancer heraldry. Though as such, there is not a great deal one can learn from it just at present, but I shall attempt. The calligramancers devised their own form of heraldry centuries ago, and while there are perhaps more written records pertaining to this particular sect’s history than any other, all these records were taken down by members thereof. So it is hardly surprising that perusal of said histories is one of the more dangerous home occupations.
According to Clarinda Hemp’s notes on the subject, the central figure often denotes something “roughly equivalent to a personal familiar, though not exactly, actually not very like at all.” The figure positioned directly above it seems to act as a modifier of some sort to the central figure; I believe it serves as a technical notation regarding the thing’s exact nature to other calligramancers, but I am uncertain to the symbol’s exact meaning.
The outer symbols are less mysterious, if they are indeed examples of Baldwin’s Stars, the “nasty, pointy ink blots of death” Clarinda wrote about. These exist as a sort of numerical code; a trio in a coat of arms signifies that the bearer used his arts to rendered military service to crown.
-Ophelia Himmle, The Search for Guppy
The concept has been sitting about for a while now. Back to Dickens.
It all began when an employee of Nine Palms Retirement Community became exposed to the contents of a mysterious thermos confiscated by internal security forces. It ended when a number of Nine Palms residents escaped the community in a garden shed secretly modified with a few thousand helium party balloons. The aforementioned security forces were unable to prevent this as they were, at that time, pinned down by the aforementioned employee, encased in a flock of inexplicably vicious pigeons.
No one in the League is quite sure where he came from, or why Ophelia Himmle finds him so interesting. Not that these questions occupy them all that much, generally they only pay him enough attention to tell if he is going to try to blow anything up too close to their chairs during tea. They are fairly certain that he is quite mad, but don’t find that sufficient reason to look down their noses, particularly when they have the much more suitable excuses of his being theoretically younger and more male than they, already.
Ophelia’s nephew, ward, and resident equivalent to a medieval serf. Undersecretary to the Office of Avatar Affairs, not that he quite understands what that means, even though he came up with the name himself.
