The Story So Far

Recent advances in revealing secrets hidden within pages illustrated by the enigmatic and hieroglyphic masonic Copiale cipher and a discovery that desperately encoded messages found on the recovered desiccated leg of a long-dead WWII carrier pigeon could be read using inherited codebooks all had me reexamining an odd package of strange scribblings … and other things … misrouted to the University of Chicago but belatedly received here at the library, which I could not until now understand fully. Apparently, something has happened to the famed occult scholar and Hermetic Library fellow T Polyphilus; perhaps while wantonly risking the reading of one eldritch tome too many … a volume I have detailed here in the past known not just sufficiently but necessarily as De Profundis.

These past few days, I have barely slept while feverishly comparing and cross-referencing and tabulating attempts at a key, but I have, with the help of the aforementioned advances and some few intuitive inspirations, finally succeeded in cracking the glyphic seal on what may be the last words of T Polyphilus. In spite of circumstances, I hold out hope that he has yet survived and I shall hear from him again.

But, I do fear something horrible, if not the worst, has befallen the man due to his well-known and ill-advised meddling in arcane things that wish themselves to remain hidden. I now fear for my own safety and am leaving the city immediately toward a destination I will not disclose on a quest following enigmatic instructions. I have also sent under separate cover to another expert in the field the other items delivered nestled within that package, which I dare not describe to you here, seeking both to hide them, from any innocent and all prying eyes, but also in effort to develop far more insight into what strange events must inevitably and irrevocably transpire next.

I hope we each arrive at our appointed stations in time.