Empire - Terra Umbra - Empire of Shadows

Empire of Shadows
Whom does the Grail serve?
- traditional
Letter from Scarlett Amaris to Richard Stanley - September 27, 2007
There’s no way she would have appeared before you in the tower if you weren’t somehow
connected to it all. Whatever power it was made my hair stand on end. The atmosphere in the
tower was supercharged. There were many presences in the keep that night but as soon as the sun
went down there was one that was so strong that it felt like my skin was on fire, but in a really
protective, heightened way. This description doesn’t do it justice at all..
What I didn’t expect was that we would see her so clearly but I knew she was coming, and I
knew where she would be. I’ve told you this before, often I sense or hear things but rarely do I see
them. We both know what we saw...a figure in a cloak, the white lady...and we both know who she
really was.
There was a dark aspect to her, and light, strength and something else I can’t define without
sounding religious. There was true magic there that night. I fully accept this experience but just
can’t come up with the “what now” of it. And when you later read Magre’s description of
Esclarmonde’s presence still being felt in the tower and how it would always be felt there, well,
that definitely takes it to another level..
From the web log of Richard Stanley - August 27, 2007
I don’t know if Esclarmonde deliberately summoned us to her castle and then stepped across
the threshold into our world or whether we were drawn into hers. She seemed solid enough at the
time but perhaps myself and Miss Scarlett were merely reliving or re-experiencing something
that had already happened hundreds of years ago, somehow picking up the White Lady’s
thoughts, or as in Rupert Sheldrake’s morphogenetic field theory, a memory of her thoughts or,
more crazily, the thoughts of some other version of myself, caught up in events that either took
place in the distant past or are still taking place now in another time stream. Perhaps those two
worlds briefly touched.
Dr Stephen Hawking recently admitted to the theoretical possibility of time travel although
he stipulated that such an operation would require a Faraday cage not dissimilar to the grid
formed by the castle walls, a superconductor, not dissimilar to those blessed black stones in my
pocket and more energy than your average A-bomb. Granted this feat may be beyond the limits
of our current technology but what if such a thing were known to the sorcerer scientists of the
past, a knowledge that the Inquisition had deliberately sought to suppress? What if the ‘dark
energy’ so beloved of our contemporary physicists turned out to be synonymous with spiritual
energy, the raw soul-fire that serves as wax to Montsegur’s taper? For a while I didn’t seem to