Cancer 9. A man shaking dew off orchids into a glass vial.
Condensing, the mist has lost its shadows and found orchids. The round surfaces of the globules magnify the dawn twilight and its fading stars. He has come to collect the dew, filled with the orchid’s light. When he has enough he shall take it to his laboratory and there stabilize the orchids’ fleeting spirit captured in the dew, so that it may be amplified and preserved, and eventually used to help his patients relocate their own inner gardens and dawns where their forgotten orchids are blooming.
Azoth Oracle
The sound of singing voices echoes through a dark, cavernous cathedral.
The glass columns of the cathedral of Tradith are of smooth lead crystal imbued with the slightest amount of silver. Architects marvel that over many centuries these tall columns which support the amazingly high ceiling of the cathedral have never been damaged, or even scratched, and attribute their integrity and perfection to magic rites with which the original architects protected them.
The columns are thought to store the memories of sound, for at certain times they begin to spontaneously reverberate with a chorus of voices who sing the canticles of antiquity, just as they were sung long ago in the cathedral. This happens infrequently, and never during rituals or services, but always at night when the cathedral is mostly empty.
Irnad, who has studied the phenomenon has found that the columns sing always on the evening prior to a lunar eclipse, and says he thinks that the voices stored in the columns and which are released at these times have a regenerative effect on the cathedral, which has never in its long life been in need of repairs.