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“A curious place. Words for words, secrets for secrets, places for places.”
Your head spins, your ears bleed. You do not remember what you told him, but you remember what he told you, where to go.
Note: Alexander is a probability-curve of a person. It modifies possibility and time, rewriting what he did in the past at a whim.
==== Calliope, the Nameless ====
{{Aspect|Knock|12}} {{Aspect|Edge|12}}
They say that there was a Name of the Great Serpent who made many enemies; an assassin or warrior of the Snake. When her master disappeared, they say that those enemies took their opportunity and hunted her, but she evaded them all one by one. Still they persevered and still they continued. Until one day, as she burned down a workshop of the Maker she had been hiding in to cover her tracks, she met a different master, but the same master. That being told her that it could help her. It could make it so that she could never be properly remembered, except by it and its associates. Her enemies would forget what she truly was. Their minds would fill with misinformation and misconceptions, and she could wreak her horrible, horrible vengeance. All it desired was her services. Gleefully, she accepted, and so Calliope, the Nameless, was born.
But that of course, is just a possible tale. Probably, it is a lie. Probably, Calliope is not even really her name. She cannot be recorded; words viscerally refused to describe her, and she cannot be remembered; memories rearrange and reshape themselves if they relate to her. Only the Tail knows now. She slays as she did as a Name of the Great Serpent, simply with rapier and poison. Probably. But what is almost certain is that many enemies of the Tail have been slain in broad daylight, butchered horribly, while bystanders squabble and dispute over what happened with almost no agreement...
==== Al-Avaz, Deadener ====
{{Aspect|Winter|12}} {{Aspect|Lantern|12}}
Law and Glory is poison to the Tail, and the Tail is wise enough to practice Mithridatism, at least in one of its servants. Al-Avaz was once a scholar in Baghdad's golden age who dreamed of the Glory, and dreamed too hard. He did not ascend in service of an Hour, but to the Glory, and immediately regretted that as the law seared him and tore him apart. But the Tail took notice, and sacrificed a hundred Visitors to reach into the heart of the Glory, the heart of Anathema and drag him out. With Nowhere, it rebuilt the scholar's form, Glory and Nowhere intermixed within itself. When he returned to consciousness, he was different. Both law and unlaw lived and churned within him, and expressed itself in him.
Now, Al-Avaz is one of the least strange Names of the Tail. He too is a being of Law, but of a different Law. This law permits no opposition against the Tail. He can nullify and deaden aspects, invocations become nothing than hollow words when said against the Tail's interests, artifacts nothing more than their physical force. Though Tail despises any law, it somewhat happily tolerates this, one of its most interesting powers, but uses him sparingly. When he manifests, it represents the Tail being very, very invested in an outcome.
==== The Deep-Venturer ====
{{Aspect|Knock|12}} {{Aspect|Moth|12}}
Even more strange in its identity and radical in its goal than the Tail is the Deep-Venturer. Its envoy to Temple Nil, it looks like a human, but is nothing like, being not even physical, but rather just an error in space and time. Its source is a mystery, but the Tail claims that it was once a Name of the Great Serpent who delved far, far too deep into Temple Nil. As a distortion in space, it can twist and pull, making distances appear near infinite or almost nothing, depending on its whim. It is sometimes vast, sometimes tiny. Space is no constraint to this thing.
==== A Visitor from Nowhere ====
'''Description:'''
It seems to be doing something like smiling. And smiling. And smiling. Somewhere new to open? New things to visit? It'd be delighted...
Note: Tail emanations. Drags people into not-being.
==== Unravellers ====
{{Aspect|Forge|1}} {{Aspect|Knock|1}}
After the Engine betrayed it, the Tail did not take such a thing lightly. When the war ended, it asked its erstwhile allies for only one thing. The corpses and wrecks of the destroyed Names and machines of the Engine, strewn across the carcass of the Fifth History. With its spoils, it experimented and poked the machines, attempting to restore some sort of life to them, to perhaps create a Nowhere-tainted twisted mirror to the Engine. It did not succeed. Not completely. But it made these. Nowhere-corrupted machines, not an Hour, but monstrous creatures restored to a facsimile of their former function. Not great automata bristling with glowing energy like the Engine's children, but shattered cogs and gears and ruined pistons and scraps of machinery twisting and writhing in a ghost of function, but blessed with an almost terrifying determination and the ability to with just a handful of them, assemble from nearly anything thousands and thousands more. They nibble away at the structure of the Mansus, their exponential growth only impeded by the efforts of many Hours, and at the Engine's innards, seeking to usurp its place. Hours slay them delicately. Too many and the Engine's attentions will be turned away from preserving itself from the Unravellers, too few and the Mansus may collapse...
====Voyagers and Not-Voyagers====
Sometimes someone spurns the attention of normal Hours. Perhaps they have unusual desires. Perhaps they were touched by something strange. Perhaps they understood too much. Sometimes, those people acquire the attention of the Hour that destroys doors, that opens all possibilities, that is the yawning maw of enlightenment. Sometimes, they ascend high enough, sometimes, they stand on a precipice by the Anterior Opening. Sometimes, they step through, shed the constraints of form, drink the power of Nowhere, and become Voyagers. Sometimes, the step back, content upon their status, to serve the Tail in a more mundane manner, not shedding their physical forms and continuing to coexist with reality and do not-voyage. Usually, both happen.
===== Not-Voyagers =====
{{Aspect|Lantern|8}} {{Aspect|Moth|8}}
Most Long of the Tail are Not-Voyagers, the possibility that stepped back from the precipice. They are the least strange of the Tail's servants, usually in possession of proper human form at least upon the surface. The doors they shatter are simply that of psychology. Their minds are as inhuman as any Visitor, simply pressed into a human shape. To hear them talk is to invite madness. Their very presence brings madness and chaos, as law unravels around them. Their power is quite possibly the least controllable of all the Tail's minions, as they have little control over how Law unmakes around it, but that is not to say that these Long are not powerful as well.
===== Voyagers =====
{{Aspect|Lantern|10}} {{Aspect|Edge|10}}
The common Name of the Tail is the Voyager. The possibility that did step into Nowhere. They manifest misty and intangible, having shed all their form, but normally wield a single strange, tangible weapon. They serve as the shock-troopers of the Tail, when it, oh-so-rarely go to war. Although intangible, their lack of form and inability to easily adopt new ones renders them particularly vulnerable to law, requiring much Nowhere to sustain them. Their weapons distort material chemistry and physics, requiring only the minimal amount of force to move and shearing through anything without resistance. Formidable, their fragility renders them rarely seen outside Nowhere.
=== Cults ===
