Spoiler Thread for Leaves 13 and 14

Welcome to the second Quire of the Necronomicon! That's right, these pages do *not* nest into the previous Leaves, they start a new grouping. Eventually there will be seventeen Quires in the finished book.

So we pick up our narrative on pages 49-52 with Abdel finding his calling, gaining a companion and learning the hand-sign version of the Elder Sign. What's that all about? When the Elder Sign was mentioned in the Dreamquest Lovecraft wrote that Randolph Carter "asked questions about the gods, and whether they danced often upon Lerion;  but the farmer and his wife would only make the Elder Sign and tell him the way to Nir and Ulthar." This (to my mind) sounds like a gesture rather than a craft project, so that is what I have presented. Mendico, Assevero, and Invito translate from the Latin to "beg, profess, and summon/challenge". Talk about a complicated relationship...

Speaking of complicated, Aayiz has some secrets up his sleeves and offers some skill sets Abdel certainly does not have. Abdel's name for him (literally "replacement for something lost") says quite a bit about Hazred and his solipsism.

Now we jump ahead to pages 93-96 and end up in the middle of an entirely different narrative! I hope you will enjoy having stories play out and reveal themselves in reverse (like Christopher Nolan's Memento) as this is a necessary evil of the book structure. I promise to make it worth your while and mix it up a bit as we go along too.

Here we find Abdel and a companion named Akili, inside a network of tunnels were they meet decidedly different fates. In this encounter Abdel meets Sebek, an Egyptian deity brought into the Mythos by Robert Bloch. There is a reference to the Tribe of Heth and Mount Mluna, both are from a Lord Dunsany story titled "The Probably Adventure of the Three Learned Man". But on top of that, this scene (and what will come before it in future Leaves) is inspired by the novel "Of One Blood" by Pauline Hopkins. I'll be able to better explain next month as future Leaves will explain where these events are transpiring.

Sebek does reveal a secret about Akili: he is Voormis, a race created by Clark Ashton Smith that has a very sordid past. 

So that is all for now. I hope you are enjoying the book so far and I honestly can't wait to share what comes next!