u/Saddy-Dog288

I wrote and illustrated an English-language Cultist Simulator fanfic in the form of a Hush House apocryphon.

It contains lore spoilers for Cultist Simulator and Book of Hours.

English is not my native language, so I used a translator.

All ritual material below is fictional and non-actionable.

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After the War of the Roads, the Roads Did Not End

De viis post bellum

A monastic testimony on the remnants of roads

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[Later cataloguer's note, Hush House]

This text originally carried no title. Its grey white cover bore three lines: the first in iron gall ink, the second in pencil, the third washed out by water until only an indentation remained. Under raking light, the indentation can be read:

Roads have never submitted to victory or defeat.

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The present section has been assembled from these fragments:

I. A kitchen ledger from the monastery, lacking thirty two pages.

II. The corner of a prayer book page, likely from a hymnal used by servants of the Sun-in-Splendour.

III. A letter addressed to an "aunt" of the Sisterhood of the Knot. The recipient's name has been scraped away.

IV. An unsigned Latin index, where the phrase "War of the Roads" appears again and again.

V. Five lime tokens, marked respectively with Wood, White, Stag, Spider, and Peacock.

VI. A single sheet instruction titled Procedure for Lateral Pilgrimage.

VII. The confession of N. Two copies survive. The shorter copy is clearer. The longer copy is more credible.

VIII. An unfinished marginal note:

"Do not let the door know it has once been defeated."

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In the long wake of the War of the Roads, many believed that roads had been restored to roads, and doors to doors. This opinion was especially popular among priests, watchmen, and the lovers of catalogues. Victors require a passable world. The defeated require a world able to bury them. Observers require a world they can understand.

So they announced that the roads had completed their service, that the war had fulfilled its use, that bloodstains might be covered with whitewash, and that oaths might be absorbed into Sunday sermons.

This doctrine holds in mortal courts.

It has no force in the Mansus.

The roads continued to grow. Some bent inside walls. Some disguised themselves as old roads in dreams. Some left fine burrs in human habits. The lower passages of the monastery, the soles of pilgrims' shoes, merchants' walking sticks, and rainwater gathered in the cracks of stone bridges all preserved something of the roads' afterlife.

One fragment states:

After the war, walking itself became suspect.

A man going from the kitchen to the chapel might already have crossed a portion of the Wood.

A man reaching the White Door in a dream might only have walked around a table while awake.

A man offering the correct answer to the Stag Door might only have put an old key back into an old drawer.

The Spider's Door drinks blood.

The Peacock's Door demands mirrors.

The Wood favours beginners.

Doors have temperaments.

Roads have stomachs.

After the war, they learned to pass as architecture.

A later correction has been inserted here:

"Architecture is a route permitted to remain silent."

N. first appears in a kitchen ledger. At that time he was no adept, no Long, no Name. He was responsible for salt, wax, bread, wine for the sick, and keys for the guest rooms. In the ledger his hand is steady and his numbers regular. He often uses very small Latin abbreviations to save paper.

He was well suited to become the witness of a disaster.

Those best suited to witness disaster usually lack the means to prevent it. Their virtue is dullness. Their sin is the same.

After the War of the Roads, small errors began to occur in the monastery.

The south gate withdrew inward by half an inch after matins every day. No one moved the hinges.

The graveyard path gained six steps in fog, then lost one in clear weather.

A boy sent to carry wine from the barn to the well took three days and nights to return. He came back neither hungry nor thirsty. He only said there had been a stag by the well, and that in the stag's eyes were lamps of winter.

A pale stain appeared on the wall of the confessional, shaped almost like a map. At every full moon, a road to "yesterday" surfaced upon the stain. Yesterday had no house number. Yesterday had wind.

A kitchen maid sifted a lime token from the flour. It was marked "White." She gave it to N. He entered it under miscellaneous items, valuation zero.

N.'s first error began with valuation zero.

He had filed the white token as property. It belonged to passage. Once a passage enters a ledger, the ledger demands more passages to complete itself. In the following six weeks, N. found four more tokens: in the storeroom, by the well rim, in the bell tower, in the old infirmary, and in a guest room sealed after a fire.

Wood. Stag. Spider. Peacock.

When all five were present, an unfamiliar hand appeared on the inside of the ledger's back cover:

The Wood makes one begin.

The White Door makes one silent.

T

​

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This is an in-world document from my dying-earth setting, written in the style of sacred scripture. It describes a ritual—the Dwarf-Star Rite—using the language of liturgy, alchemical manuals, and funerary dirges.

My goal was to build a magic system that forbids comprehension: the rite works only if participants do not fully understand what they are doing, and the text itself is full of redactions, contradictions, and warnings. I wanted the act of reading to feel like an act of trespass.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on using apocryphal formats for fantasy worldbuilding, and whether the ritual’s logic holds together even as the text insists you must not understand it.

My English is not very good, so I used a translator.

I wrote this. English is not my first language. I hope it finds someone who needs it.

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The Last Scion of the Sun

The Dwarf-Star Rite (later called by others: The Dwarf-Star Dirge):

What you now read is not a history that occurred, but a possibility bent forth by photons.

A copyist wrote it, a thief stole it, an exegete deconstructed it — wherefore it reads at once as gospel, as indictment, and as truth.

Some say Latalan never existed, that he was merely a name the multitude invented on the seventh day of the eclipse, to stand in place of dread.

Others say he was the last scion of the sun — that the sun had bequeathed a seed within his body, a seed that smoldered against his breast and compelled him to accomplish something that left the world colder.

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The Prefatory Dwarf-Star Rite: On the Last Scion of the Sun and the Definition of a Dwarf Star (An Unreliable Account)

Latalan first appeared in the makeshift shanties along the city's northern edge, where dust hung suspended in air like unuttered prayers lingering upon the tongue.

He had long hair of a deep brown — he was androgynous and beautiful — and his face was pale as snow. His green eyes cast a bewildered, faraway light. He neither begged the streets like a mendicant, nor foretold doom like a prophet in the old manner. He merely stood a pane of black glass by the roadside, and bade passersby to look within, and to see how that glass refused to give back their reflection.

"Do you see?" he murmured. "You can still place your gaze into it, but it refuses to return you. This is what the sun now does to us."

He called himself "the last scion of the sun." The evidence he offered was not a lineage, but a crueler testimony: his eyelids never lowered; his tear ducts were sealed with salt; his pupils held a faint golden displacement, as though some far-off source of light were using him as a lens. This he called: "All I still retain is the capacity to be wounded by daylight."

The eclipse, he declared, was no occlusion, but the sun's momentary release of its own pretense.

"The sun above us now," he said, "is nothing but the diadem of your own memory — worn too long, it has pierced the sky. The true sun has already been hidden inside some book, or some dream, or some child's first cry.

Therefore we are not to call it back, for to call it back is to observe, and to observe is catastrophe.

What we must do is give it a surrogate — a dwarf star, small enough to be loved, yet large enough to be offered up."

In Latalan's telling, the dwarf star was no celestial body, but a vessel:

It would receive all human memory of the sun — let those memories condense in a single place, into something capable of radiating heat, capable of weeping, capable of atonement. This vessel would become a sun in miniature: one dwarf star. Like the sun it would glow and warm, yet would illumine only that hollow within the heart you least wish to acknowledge: your dependence upon the dawn, your resentment of loss, your longing for the homeland, your obscure intimation of the truth that time ought not to exist.

Thus the first commandment of the Dwarf-Star Rite:

Thou shalt not understand what thou art doing.

For understanding brings time to a standstill. The Dwarf-Star Rite permits only: to weep, to offer up, to mistake yourself for someone still redeemable.

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The Appointed Hours: On the Temporal Conditions of the Dwarf-Star Rite (Repeatedly Emended)

The Dwarf-Star Rite may only be conducted within the interstice where light bends.

According to Latalan, a dwarf star's state is the hour when the sun most resembles a fetus: not yet having learned what it is, not yet having learned to rise.

During any eclipse, this interstice does not come but once — it repeats, like breath:

The First Interstice: The dark sun brushes the rim. The world feels lightly bitten.

The Second Interstice: Shadows sink to their deepest. Clocks begin to feel shame.

The Third Interstice: Shadows loosen. All things briefly doubt whether they exist.

(Note: Some manuscripts call this third interstice the Photon Blueshift, a signal of something approaching. Other manuscripts claim the blueshift comes from the Woman of Memory,