Thelemy Maskelyne appears oblivious to this. Entranced by the sight of the towering Clock Tree, now beneath him, he mutters:
-Were I to pass through a desert, and encounter no-one and nothing; absolutely nothing living or moving, other than a clock amongst the barren sands...
Thelemy Maskelyne declares, whilst gazing upon the whirring mechanical contrivances surrounding him,
- I suppose that would make me... a Clock-Maker? The cCLock-MmAKERrr?? Ha, aha ha ha, HA -
You see Thelemy Maskelyne pulling off his fine gloves
>>5693143and cupping his face in his fingers, as he chatters erratically in breathless eagerness. The shadows of his warped and twitching hands cast a fluttering agitation of contorted shapes against the backdrop of the clock mechanism.
For some reason, you witness the writhing penumbra of his fingers, akin to the shadow of a monstrous and engorged hundred-handed ogre, the hecatoncheires of old, stood upon a riverbank stained red and choked with felled deadwood and uprooted trees. The clotted river has the colouration of cooked blood. The far side of it simply drops into a cliff of impenetrable darkness; the edge of a trench, the precipice of an abyss.
-Of course, you have failed...
The Magician is giggling, hysterically smirking as if suppressing an outburst at some secret mirth,
-You have not found the Odalisque. And you cannot command this machine, this wondrous clockwork engine of consciousness, this iron cage of Time - either... (You realise to your horror that there is no response to the calendar date you submitted
>>5714836 ) You have failed much as Mortmain failed; indeed, it seems you may have followed mostly along in his own footsteps. Followed in his miserable failure. For you see, his machine is obsolete. He commands a mortal city through his Edicts; his machine surpasses any individual in intellect, in memory, in pure cogitation - Power! Yet it is nothing without desire. It does not know or want anything. Intellect in the absence of Will is blind, a dead instrument of others. A slave. It has driven Mortmain mad - he is so close, but he cannot have Her... For Will is derived through this need, this wanting, this desire...and all Desire belongs to Her...
