Being a complete accounting of those works which one Is advised to approach with caution. The previous owners of several were not.
Prefatory Note: I wish to note that several of the texts described herein have caused the deaths, disappearances, or irreversible psychological alterations of their previous scholars. Not all but more so than not. One volume consumed its previous scholar in what witnesses described as a process more akin to digestion than to any recognized form of violence. I have included it anyway, because the annals of knowledge must be complete, even when completeness carries a cost the prudent mind would rather not pay. Copies of this work have been distributed to locations that interested parties will find inconvenient. — The Chronicler
by Ellandren Moonwhisper, 4598 AR The Moonwhisper family has, across two generations, contributed more to gate-working scholarship than any other scholarly lineage I can identify. Whether this reflects exceptional intellectual inheritance or suggests that something in the family's history drew them into this particular domain with a compulsion exceeding mere academic interest, I do not…
The Ashen Grimoire takes its name from its condition. Every surviving copy has been partially burned, and the consensus among those who have studied the phenomenon is that the burning was not inflicted from without but enacted by the Grimoire itself, a form of selective disclosure that the text applies to its own pages with…
I hesitate to classify the Black Ledger as a grimoire or tome of forbidden knowledge. It is, technically, a research journal: a record of hypothesis, procedure, observation, and result, written by a man who was, at the start, a promising graduate student in the alchemical sciences at the University of Lepidstadt, and who was, by…
The Bleicth Testament Vocati occupies a peculiar position in dream-working literature: it is cited constantly and understood almost never. Every serious scholar of the Vocati Somnia tradition has an opinion about it. These opinions contradict each other in ways that suggest either successful obfuscation by the author of the text or that most scholars in…
The Book of the Lost poses a problem for catalogers that I will address directly. It is not clear that it can be properly cataloged. What I can catalog is the concept of the Book of the Lost, its reputation, its documented effects on those who have encountered it, and the consistent testimony about its…
On Whether a Book Can Have a Personality There is a longstanding argument among scholars about whether a book can possess a personality. The argument is generally considered settled in the negative. Books are objects; objects do not have personalities; scholars who maintain otherwise are projecting. The Book of Unseen Currents makes this argument extremely…
by the Pathfinder Society, 4521 AR This is one of the oldest text in the catalog with a historically verified source and in certain respects, the most practically useful of the scholarly works collected here, which is not a distinction I assign lightly given that several of its competitors can be used to summon things.…
The Physical Object The physical book announces what it is before a single page is turned. The cover is leather, if leather is the right word for a material with the texture and weight of flesh that has been dried without entirely ceasing to remember its origins. It is papery, fragile, and tinged with the…
The title of this work is the first thing worth examining. A mirror implies reflection. A spiral implies progression that returns to its origin, but not at the same point. The mirror of the endless spiral, then, is something that shows you where you have been as you continue forward, each pass revealing the same…
I will begin with what is known, then proceed to what is suspected, and conclude with what I believe to be true but cannot prove. The distinction matters, because this text has attracted more credulous speculation than almost anything else in this catalog, and most of that speculation misses what is genuinely extraordinary about it…
by the Ncuti of the Magaambya, 4578 AR Of all the texts in this catalog, this one has saved the most lives, and I say this with the particular confidence of someone who has read a great many texts that made the same claim about themselves. The Magaambya track their scholarship's practical outcomes with a…
I want to be careful about how I introduce this text, because texts like this have a way of being introduced poorly, either with sensationalism that makes them sound more dramatic than dangerous, or with dry academic neutrality that makes them sound safer than they are. The Enchiridion of Invocation and Control is a practical…
by Brother Aldemar, 4589 AR Brother Aldemar began this book as a survey and finished it as something closer to a confession. The first seven chapters are excellent archaeological work: careful observation, precise documentation, patient attention to physical detail. The final chapters are the work of someone who has understood something they cannot ununderstand, and…
The Fragments of the Living Library are not quite a text. They are pages: individual sheets of a material that is not paper, not vellum, not parchment, though it resembles each in different lights and at different temperatures. Each Fragment is a preserved portion of a Book Golem, which is to say a portion of…
I want to establish something before I describe the Shards: the name "Inr'terzis" is not the name their creator gave them. It is the closest phonetic approximation a Thassilonian-era scholar produced when attempting to transcribe a sound recorded in proximity to an active Shard during a period of what the scholar called "emanation." Whether the…
DO NOT READ THIS BOOK! Chronicler's Note: The nature of the Insidias Armis is not documented. Its subject, its author, its age, and its origins are not documented. What is documented, in scattered accounts across several institutional records and in at least one personal correspondence I was not meant to see, is what has befallen…
This text was composed in Varisian, which is unusual for a scholarly work of this depth. The choice was deliberate. The author wrote for practitioners with specific cultural context rather than for the academic community, and the text rewards that intended readership in ways a formally structured treatise could not. It reads differently depending on…
I must now discuss a book, and I have been putting this entry off longer than any other in this catalog. Other entries I delayed because the material was complex, or because I needed time to organize what I knew. I delayed this one because every time I sat down to write it, I found…
by Elara Moonwhisper, 4602 AR The Moonwhisper sisters arrived at related problems from opposite directions. Ellandren approached the elven Aiudara and asked what they revealed about the nature of planar transit and the architectural relationship between constructed gates and the planes they connect. Elara asked a prior question: before anyone built anything, before any civilization…
by Valdren Iceweaver, 4595 AR Valdren Iceweaver is a field researcher of genuine courage, or genuine recklessness, and the text he produced in 4595 AR reflects both qualities in approximately equal measure. The first virtue of the book is that Iceweaver went to the places he wrote about. The second is that he survived them.…
The "Prophecies of Lost Days" is, by its own account, a text about time written by something not subject to it. Whether this claim, which appears in the preface, should be taken literally is a question I have spent more time on than was perhaps wise. The preface's author does not identify themselves. They do…
There are sounds that were never meant to be written down, and the Q'illu Chants are among them. The scholar who first committed these vocalizations to physical form chose vellum prepared from creatures that had died in proximity to places of power and transcendence, not for dramatic effect but because ordinary materials would not hold…
Rachkastein is the kind of scholar other scholars write about in cautionary terms, which guarantees both that the work is significant and that no one will admit to finding it so in polite company. The Bestiarum der Verblichen: the word bestiarum meaning a catalog of beasts, the word verblichen meaning, in the archaic tongue from…
The Red Ledger takes its name from the color of its binding, which is red in the way that things are red when they have absorbed a great deal of what makes red things red over sustained use. This is the complete physical description I am prepared to offer. What distinguishes the Red Ledger from…
The name translates as "scriptorium from the darkness" or "scriptorium of the darkness," since the construction of the text of the author seems to allow for and relies on both translations. I say this because the Scriptorium ex Tenebris, in my experience, is not a text that does things accidentally. Every property it possesses appears…
by Valdessa Sharpe, 4598 AR Valdessa Sharpe published this work at thirty-one. I mention this not to characterize her as precocious but because the age matters in a specific way: she had not yet developed the professional instinct that causes experienced scholars to soften conclusions before print, to qualify findings that will make powerful people…
by Valdren Thross, 4601 AR Valdren Thross opens his treatise with a warning that I have read many times and that I believe he meant seriously rather than as a scholarly formality. The warning states that the applications he is about to describe have never been tested, and that they likely never will be, because…
Versteckte Kulte was not written by any single author. It was compiled across several decades by a loose consortium of scholars who shared, in addition to their academic interests, the specific quality of stubbornness required to keep studying something that repeatedly demonstrated its preference for not being studied. The compilation process involved correspondence, clandestine meetings,…
The Vocati Codex is the surviving compendium of the Vocati Somnia tradition, and its relationship to the Bleicth Testament Vocati is the first thing that should be understood about it. The Testament is older, stranger, and organized according to principles that resist the kind of linear reading that produces useful instruction. The Codex is the…
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