O truant Muse, what shall be thy amends

for thy neglect of truth in Beauty dyed?

Both truth and beauty on my love depends;

So dost thou too, and therein dignified.

Make answer, Muse: wilt thou not haply say,

'Truth needs no colour, with his colour fixt;

Beauty no pencil, beauty's truth to lay;

But best is best, if never intermixt'?

Because he needs no praise, wilt thou be dumb?

Excuse not silence so: for't lies in thee

To make him outlive a gilded tomb,

And to be praised of ages yet to be.

Then do thy office, Muse; I teach thee how

To make him seem long hence as he shows now.

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 101

The shabby man, who was not dressed in his usual shabby attire (it being well after bedtime), awoke with a gasp and sat bolt upright. He stared wide-eyed and blinking into the darkness, his breath coming raggedly, and his heart beating triphammer against his rib cage, tadumtadumtadumtadumtadumtadum. Even as he came to full wakefulness, whatever dream had triggering this behavior faded from his grasp, and his body began to calm itself.

Wiping away the sweat that had beaded on his forehead (in spite of the chill air) with a forearm, he took a deep breath and reached over to the nightstand to light his lamp. As the oil-laden wick caught, the shabby man's studio became increasingly visible.

Thaddeus Smythe, proprietor, threw off his covers and got out of bed, making for the sink on the other wall. He turned the tap and cupped his hands to catch the water, then proceeded to douse his face with it. Then he opened his eyes and saw the reflection of a young girl of about 10 with rather unhappy eyes staring back at him.

Startled, he cursed and spun around, intending to accost the young lady for entering unannounced. His curses died a-birthing on his lips as he found that there was, in fact, nobody in the room but himself.

An hour later, after encountering no further weirdness and failing to detect anything with his magick, Thaddeus went back to bed. He tossed and turned for quite some time afterwards, unable to shake the feeling that he should know the girl's name...

A little girl kicked off her dress shoes, abandoned all pretense at being a prim and proper young victorian lady, and bolted for the post box as soon as she heard the rattle of the gate, running pell-mell to beat the maid to it.

"Miss Penelope, young lades oughtn't behave so rambunctious-like. What if the master saw you?" chastized the maid, who had lost the race. She unconsciously cast a worried glance towards the ceiling and the general direction of Penelope's step-father.

The girl ignored her, tore open the mail box before the postman had even gotten to the gate, and darted back inside. She quickly found an envelope addressed to "Penny", and handed the rest of the post to the maid without even looking at her. She started to run off towards her room, but didn't even get out of the hall before her excitement got the better of her. She stopped and opened the envelope as carefully as she could stand, then stood there reading, as her excitement quickly was replaced with a more somber expression, and her eyes looked suspiciously as if they were beginning to water...

"Dearest Miss Penelope Alita Radley-Smythe,

Goodness yes, I will be coming home from university for the break! I know you would like me to arrive instantaneously, or preferably sooner, but unfortunately I will be later than I originally planned, more's the pity. I will be delayed here a day or two to take care of some business. What's got you in such a state to see me?

You are a most ill-behaved girl, what with all this rushing hither and yon. Don't think for a moment I am fooled by your false compliments. One would think you had forgotten how many times you announced your utter hatred of me before I left home, especially after the "honey" incident, but here you are, practically asking me to post myself there. I think I should look quite undignified stamped and marked and stuffed in the post box.

Ah well, you will recall the traditional sibling attitude quite soon enough, I expect. Especially as I have devised a water-sprayer with your name on it.

Seriously though, Penny, I will be there soon. I have a gift for you. Since I know how much you hate surprises, I will go ahead and tell you ... it is a pendulum necklace. Not exactly the bejeweled sort, but we both know you already have plenty of that sort of thing.

Well, ta for now. I will see you when I see you. Remember, not a word to anyone else.

Your brother,

Thaddeus Chatwyn Radley-Smythe"

As the day drew to a close, the setting sun found Penelope sitting in a corner of her room, having begged off lessons from the Governness on the excuse of illness (and she did look more than a little peaked, the Governness had said). She was trying, not entirely successfully, to avoid looking at The Door, and she jumped at every tiny sound even though she knew it would be hours yet...

Later that night, Thaddeus stepped out of the carriage and tipped the driver, then opened the gate. Knowing that the servants would already be asleep and that he wasn't expected by Penny for a few days and by anyone else at all, he let himself in the house.

Humming softly to himself as he spun Penelope's gift around by its chain, he proceeded upstairs and down the hall to her door. It was slightly ajar. He would just pop in and put it around her neck as she slept. She would be surprised to find it in the morning, and scold him at length for arriving on time after all, and not waking her.

... at least, that was the plan.

It was forgotten as soon as he opened the door and saw what was going on.

Thaddeus had still been spinning the little wooden amulet as he opened the door. Deprived of further impetus, its momentum carried it up into an arc above his hand. And then it hung there, impossibly, in midair. Light from the hall entered the room, and his gaze locked on the tear-filled eyes of his little sister.

A wave of something like an inaudible, solidified scream went out from the girl to Thaddeus, though her mouth was clamped tightly shut. A disorienting montage of imagery from school and other scenes from his life blazed through his mind in an instant, more of an incoherent jumble than a sequential vision.

He suddenly understood quite a few things that had eluded him moments before. The montage grew faster and faster ... and then the world took a left turn and ran headlong into the impossible.

The pendulum above his hand reversed direction and began to fall...

... once.

Thaddeus' stepfather noticed the light and looked back at the intruder with a gasp. Whatever he saw in the boy's face caused the blood to drain from his own.

... twice.

Light flared in the room. The pendulum had become an actinic miniature sun, throwing crazy shadows across the room as it swung through its arc

... a third time.

Thaddeus' eyes were no longer human. Small flames emerged from the sockets, but didn't seem to burn Thaddeus himself.

... a fourth time.

The girl named Penelope Alita Radley-Smythe, Thaddeus' younger sister, beheld what she could only comprehend as an angel aflame. She reached out her hand toward it. Then she simply vanished.

... a fifth time.

Brenton Radley, Esquire, thought that he witnessed a very apparition of hell that had come knocking at the door. Curiously, he tried to cover himself with the bedcloth as he cowered from it, and completely failed to notice the absence of the bed's owner.

... a sixth time.

Radley became aware of a noise growing in the room. He assumed it was coming from the demon standing at the door (who had yet to move), but he was wrong, as he discovered when the walls of the room began to crack and a deafening howling emerged from the gaps, along with a sick ruddy light. He blinked and noticed that the light seemed to literally be eroding the walls, gnawing at the edges of the fragments.

... a seventh time.

The room (and the figure on the bed within) burst into flames. Moments before he was immolated, Mr. Radley would have said that the flames were behaving in a most peculiar fashion. There were six or seven distinct streams of flame emerging from the walls and ceiling, which shaped their surfaces into screaming faces. They seemed to circle about him and pause before they struck, disturbingly like predators circling the prey.

Thaddeus turned to leave. A long menagerie of flame-creatures in shapes both mundane and fantastic marched out the door in single file behind him like the cars of a locomotive, their sizes ranging from as large as a dog to as small as a butterfly, and their colors covering the visible spectrum and a few colors besides. As their feet touched the floor, boiling copper rose up like mud displaced beneath a boot heel, which rapidly solidified into a footprint as the foot ascended once more. These prints then lazily drifted and eddied across the floor to the right, as if they were individual leaves floating on a stream, rebounding off of table legs as if they were branches half-submerged.

When the prints reached the wall, they passed into it and disappeared. The prints of whales were particularly nonsensical.

... a sixth time.

Radley felt something moving inside, and felt sudden nausea as he realized that his organs were shifting about of their own volition. The heat in the room grew intense. The distortion in the air seemed not only to refract the room, but also entirely seperate planes of reality, most of which were not conducive to human life.

Fortunately for Radley, he didn't have enough time left to discover that the thing that had been his spleen was about to complete its beady-eyed, sharp taloned predation of his pounding heart.

... a seventh time.

Radley screamed as the fires of Hell popped by for a visit and blasted him to oblivion. The howling noise in the house grew in pitch, and the walls began to ripple and shift sickeningly in the servant's quarters on the lower floor. Thaddeus had made his way to the bottom of the stairs, eyes still aflame, pendulum still shining like a magnesium flare. The mahogany walls and floor in the study had begun to run like melting wax, except that they then flowed up toward the ceiling.

... a fifth time.

The air in the house seemed to become solidified blackness, except around Thaddeus and his incendiary tagalongs. The chandeliers sprayed an inch-wide stream of liquid fire from each fixture, which did not pool on the floor, or even burn it, but merely seemed to cease to exist where it should have splattered. Thaddeus was walking down the hall toward the door, and the path before him had become a tunnel formed by sine waves of purple lava seemingly wrapped around an invisible cylinder.

... a seventh time.

As Thaddeus reached the porch, the world suddenly came back to him. He didn't notice the pendulum stop its arcing and glowing, and come to rest pointing straight down. He stuck it in his pocket absent-mindedly almost immediately, as he became aware that there was a house in flames behind him, and that it seemed to be his home. He dove off the porch as the entire house exploded in a tremendous unearthly roar, rolling on the ground and spraining a foot for his trouble. The flames flickering through the windows, however, were no healthy orange-red. It ranged across all the colors of the spectrum, including black for a few seconds before settling back to normal. The neighborhood was in an uproar a few minutes afterwards as the neighbors threw themselves out of bed at all the ruckus.

It developed that Thaddeus had barely escaped the explosion (officially determined to be caused by a defective gas boiler) with his life, and had to be taken to the hospital for minor injuries (mostly suffered in his dive off the porch, although there were some minor burns). The master of the house, Mr. Radley, and the household staff had all been killed instantly.

Curiously, no mention or inquiry was ever made concerning the status of one Miss Penelope Alita Radley-Smythe. Either by the authorities, or by Thaddeus.

Over the next few months, Thaddeus explored his newfound abilities without much direction or understanding. He had inherited a small fortune (what remained of the family wealth after the house and contents were destroyed). He didn't feel much loss ... he had never been overly close to his stepfather, and his mother had died in an accident several years ago. He had been mildly fond of some of the household staff, though. So he wasn't hard pressed to secure an income or return to school.

Eventually, he was rescued from a tense standoff with some thugs by an older man named Jasper P. Hutton, who apparently had similar powers to those of Thaddeus and recognized them in the younger man. Jasper claimed to be able to teach Thaddeus all about what he was, and Thaddeus (who wasn't having much luck with it on his own) accepted. Thaddeus proved a quick study and progressed rapidly through the rudiments of Hermetic theory, or at least those bits of it that Miskers tended to teach. (It should be noted that having an Ex Miscellenae mentor was also key in filtering out centuries worth of useless trivia.)

Jasper had a few run-ins with the Technocratic Union during Thaddeus' apprenticeship, not many of which gave him serious trouble. However, Thaddeus did rescue him from one situation in which Jasper was having Paradox problems, and his grateful mentor bestowed a gift upon him: a Tarot deck known as the Shadow Trumps of Zelrognian, which Jasper had obtained many years before (his magickal style had little use for tarots, and he was not an artist like Thaddeus).

During this period of his life, Thaddeus never once wondered where he had obtained the small wooden pendulum-necklace that he used as one of his magickal foci. And the name Penelope never even entered his mind...

After a year or two of training, Jasper and Thaddeus moved into the Horizon Realms, mostly to get away from the Technocracy's periodic intrusions into their research. They moved to the Hermetic Chantry Doissetep.

Eventually, two things became clear. First, Thaddeus had learned all he could from Jasper. Second, the ubiquitous political intrigue of Doissetep's environs did not agree with Thaddeus. Jasper helped Thaddeus achieve recognition as a full-fledged Hermetic, and they parted amicably. Thaddeus left Doissetep hurriedly, in case his distaste should provoke a conflict with some Hermetic Master and either get him disintegrated, or damage his Master's reputation.

He moved back to London, which was no big danger to him, since the Technocracy had never directly encountered anyone but his Mentor. He used part of his savings to purchase a small building on the East Side and opened up a shop there which he called the Fantabulum Artificium. This shop was mostly just to provide something to occupy his time and buy art supplies for his hobby of painting and sculpting. It also kept him in informed about the goings-on in the city, through the gossip of his customers. Or so he told himself. Truthfully, he was drawn toward the East side for some reason he couldn't quite nail down.

To avoid looking out of place, Thaddeus took to dressing in ill-kempt clothing and behaving rather oddly (although what passed for normal with him at this point would, itself, be considered a mite peculiar).

"You will be provided with the skills necessary."

-- The Shiftship Algonquin, just before cramming several years worth of science and engineering into Thaddeus brain in the space of a few seconds.

Somewhere, a sad little girl felt something invading her, something that threatened her very existence. She realized that she was no longer completely safe just hiding. There was only one thing she could do...

Thaddeus would help.

**East London, The Fantabulum Artificium, present day, 4:00pm**

Thaddeus sat back and looked at the drawing he had just made. He wondered at the identity of the little girl in this drawing (and the ten sketches that had preceeded it today, to say nothing of that dream or whatever it was this morning), and why her image kept coming from his hands, even when he intentionally tried to draw something else.