The sign of Karka, the Crab, reigned high in the sky over the One
and Only Secret Temple of the Nine Unknown Men. Rather, it reigned
high over one of the
One and Only Secret Temples—one of the hundreds that dotted the
seven continents of the Earth. The Nine Unknown, the keepers of the
world’s most powerful ancient knowledge, had a number of curious
traditions, and it was these traditions that served to make a joke of
the name of their great place of worship. It was their custom that
each of their number would independently become leader of his own
Nine, taking for himself nine lieutenants—who in turn would take
nine aides of their own. These nine then took their own nine
servants, who took their
own, and so on and so forth into infinity. Thus were the Nine, who
could shatter cities with metal discs the size of coins, and unlock
the innermost secrets of time and space, but one Nine in a sea of
Nines, Nines all the way down, most of them false and corrupt in
nature. If the true Nine were Gods—if there was indeed such a thing
as the true Nine—then all others were like Demiurges, delusional
impostor creators who writhed and seethed in their own ignorance. And
each of these Demiurges, in their vanity, needed a fortress to pray
and worship in.
So it was that the two of the Nine who spoke on this starry night,
in the courtyard of this Temple, did not know if they were of the
true Nine, or of one of the many Demiurge factions that had arisen
over the last two thousand years. They knew that if they were truly
worthy of the wisdom of the Nine it would not concern them what the
truth was, for their only responsibility was to maintain the great
power that the ancient Emperors had entrusted to them in centuries
past—it was that
that made them the Nine. The Unknown Men were guardians of the nine
books of knowledge, which together held the answers to all the
mysteries of science and technology; for generations they had guided
humanity’s progress in accordance to the teachings of these tomes,
as per the wishes of the long-dead enlightened Imperials.
Of course, just as there were seemingly-infinite Nines, there were
also seemingly-infinite tomes, all of which had slightly different
things to say about the nature of science and reality. All of the
Nines asserted they alone held the truth, if only for the sake of the
time-honored tradition of constant disagreement. All the Nines had
always disagreed, and they felt they always had to do so, for the
sake of ritual as much as for their own subjective truth. Some of
them hoped that maybe this great disagreement might eventually lead
to the revelation or alchemization of a final truth, a truth-beyond-truth, but there were just as many
who felt the exact opposite. So it was with all controversies within
their unwilling collective. All views, all interpretations were
espoused, until they built and swelled into the senseless cacophony
that was the real Nine’s greatest disguise.
