Work Text:
Twenty-six letters of English, arranged in just such a way, with the right repetitions and omissions, will tell a story. Out of the infinite combinations and recombinations, many will be true stories. For example, they might be arranged in this way:
Wulfric Geyer is in a boring class at the University of Chicago. It is a required class for the major, intro level stuff. If, he thinks, one were to assign a value of 1 to the letter "a", and a value of 2 to "b", and on and on, one might perform arithmetic with letters. In this way, "boring class" would have a sum total of 119.
119, in turn, has a total of 2: balanced, static. A geometric line segment, with no depth or height. Musically, the supertonic, existing only to be heard in passing to another note. In Haggoth Occult Numerology, 2 is... The class has grown completely silent, and everyone looks at Wulfric. Clearly, he has missed a question addressed to him.
At the back of the class, a timid sophomore raises his hand. "Dr. Geyer, I was only asking whether there would be a lecture today?"
Ah. Yes. He consults his notes. "Indeed. Harmony and counterpoint in Western Musical Structure." Gathering his thoughts, he reads the assigned text aloud. If his students had followed his instructions they should have listened to Bach's seventh Contrapunctus. None of this dreadful prose would be needed if they had. But he doubts, strongly doubts, that even a handful of these students listened to it with more than half an ear, and fewer still took the time to truly understand Bach's work. So he must read them the words of lesser theorists, butchering the ideas with every sentence.
He pauses after one particularly stupid example of retrograde thematic composition and surveys the class. Good, they are as contemptuous of this so-called instruction as he is! He notes, briefly, that "a bad retrograde" also sums to 119 before plowing through the rest of his lecture as quickly as possible.
The same letters could be arranged differently and would tell a different story. Perhaps they could be arranged in this way:
Wulfric Geyer is running for his life through a secret tunnel in a hidden sub-basement of the Mansueto Library, frantically trying to remember the notes of a song. He had heard it only moments earlier, but it had been very dim, like listening to your neighbor's radio late at night. It had also been incredibly complex, and it technically wasn't a "song," but music is the closest analog Wulfric has ever been able to come up with for these ineffable building blocks of reality.
Behind him, twenty feet away, is the reason that he runs. An undetectable, invisible wrongness that hates him. It is also the reason that he is trying to remember the song; because it is the Song of Shields. This is not a safe place, but the Song of Shields is part of the music that forms the fabric of the Universe, and any place that is associated with such a Song would become a safe place, Q.E.D. If Wulfric could just remember the right notes, that is.
The reason that he is running is now only fifteen feet away. The demon is invisible, but Wulfric can feel it behind him due to the magnet he has installed, temporarily, in his spine. A pedant might argue that calling it a demon is less accurate than calling it an unaligned sentient entity. That Wulfric's tool is not a magnet, but a spiritually charged relic, attuned by the will of the Archangel Zadkiel, and that nothing surgically implanted in one's spine can really be considered temporary. But all such pedantry pails in comparison to the truth that, according to Wulfric's "magnet", unless he can remember a "song" the "demon" will transform his "soul" into "nothingness".
As he skids around the corner, he spots his teammate, Entropy, who is just finishing an enormous sigil spraypainted on the wall of the tunnel. Wulfric does not remember the rest of the Song of Shields but as long as Entropy has remembered how to make their binding sigil things will turn out alright.