"You are still thinking of the world you knew, before the returning of the gods," he says, and he actually puts an arm around me. I can feel the fat and muscle of him, smell the predator sweat. "The Chamber exists wherever it is made—wherever the signs are sanctified and assembled. In a Catholic creation, that which is touched by God is incorruptible, but in the true Greece, incorruptibility is stasis and eternity is a curse of toothless age. Better to be renewed. Gods are born and fight and die, and they return stranger and stronger. So, too, the Chamber. Each iteration is different—but from within, they are all one. In 1657, the Chamber was created in Oxford by Elias Ashmole, who engraved and printed it as a collection of Tarot cards—but he mimicked the work, two thousand years earlier, of Ostanes the Persian, who came to know the Chamber through traffic with angels, and sculpted it in the clay of Kirman in 431 BC . The Knights of Malta wove it as a tapestry and paid the price for their heresy: the last of them was hanged beneath a bridge in Paris, where a plaque still bears his name. In imitation of that, you know, they hanged the banker Calvi from the Blackfriars Bridge in London!" He nudges me: ritual murder trivia, ho ho. "The Chamber was drawn in blood on the interior surfaces of the Trojan Horse, and through it marched an army of thousands, one by one. It is the door into any castle, the gateway to the best and worst of worlds. It is no less real for being hidden in the folly of a game manufactured by a decadent cultural machine for the frittering away of lives made unbearable in the real world by political wickedness and social discohesion—and in it, we shall restore the world, you and I, if you can first but find it!"