#preview: plot

We are proud to present the three site plots we will be opening with tonight!

WHO KILLED MARGARET BLOOM?

On the morning of 1 June 2020 at approximately 3.12am, a group of students returning from the annual June Dip happened on the remains of a popular student on campus, Margaret Bloom.

The scene is this—ritualistic.

And it leaves the question no one has wanted to ask, just what is going at St. Sy’s?

How many people have disappeared over the years, a sigh they must be lost in the lochs, hypnotised by the moon to follow into the darkness. Some, those who believe in folklore, swear it is the kelpies and that up here, in the highlands, things are just a bit different. Others say it’s the oppressive loneliness, that you can only be cut off so long from the world before it eats your heart from the inside.

The difference is this time there is a body and there’s no dismissal this was an accident or a choice made. No, this was a murder.

But for a ritual, for something made to look like a scene from a movie, it’s just a little too… perfect. It’s all a bit too odd; odd enough for a film, just right for how Hollywood tells you a cult should look.

The question really shouldn’t be who killed Margaret, but why did they kill Margaret?

THE SKY AS IT BREAKS

Storms are not uncommon in the Highlands. This is a place wreathed in mist and crowned by clouds; ancestral home to empty glens ruled by red deer and high peaks watching solitary above the showers and sun.

See—Scotland is a stunning place, but the Highlands?—Well, they are sublime.

Perhaps, though, what makes this lonely area of coast and mountain so magnificent is the terror you can find in only the truly beautiful. The Highlands have been ruled, but never conquered, and so it remains—a place of wilderness where wildness can be found.

Is it the landscape that informs the history, or do the ghosts here write the tumult of the weather? Cold, windy and rain-swept, homes burn fires deep into summer, and this June has been no different. The rains began on 1 June in the early morning, as dawn struggled to break through the cover of clouds. The sky wept, though, maybe for Margaret, maybe just to rain, and it hasn’t stopped—a week on and it continues.

Roads aren’t safe, they’ve said, especially not the little one of slippery stones that eventually meets the way to Inverness. Sure, you could try, but how would that look with the body of a dead girl everyone knew and no suspects except—

Everyone.

Especially you, trying to leave.

Might as well stay.

See the storm through.

Light a fire, it gets cold at night.

THE REVELATIONS OF THE TEN HEAVENLY SPHERES

There are those who believe history is not a collection of paradigms shifting forward and backwards to create our present, but rather a series of events, not all linked, stitched together with a common thread. This common thread?

God, or something like Him.

In service of Him, the world has sought to create the profound. We have filled our lives with the colour art brings, be it the heavenly chorus of hymns or master strokes of paint. It is through our pursuit of God, or something like Him, we have learned to create.

Even the Greeks thought so, ascribing human development to the divine gifts bestowed by those who watched above. We discovered fire not through chance, but the divine intercession of benevolent Prometheus; and through the flame, we made brick and from the brick came churches, and out churches came words.

(Did you know the Slavic languages were written in order to print bibles?)

Whether you believe in God, or anything like Him, the belief thereof is a stitch in humanity; one manifesting not in one interpretation, but in many. He is not only heavenly father, but Yahweh, but Allah, but the name of all the pantheons still worshipped and some now long forgotten.

The idea of Prisca Theologia is this—a single, true theology exists, which threads through all religions, coined by Marsilio Ficino, an Italian scholar and Catholic priest who through his Florentine Academy influenced the direction of the Italian Renaissance.

Ficino is best known for his treatise on the immortality of the soul, the Theologica Platonica de immortalitate animae, published in 1474 and for his translation of Plato’s complete extant works into Latin. He is also less known for his incomplete translation of Apocalypsis de decem orbes, or the Revelation of the ten spheres. The book itself, likely written by Hermes Trismegistus, was lost and forgotten; left as it was to gather dust not only in memory, but in a library.

A library on St. Sy’s.

A library in which it has just been found.

The introduction has been translated into Latin, but the rest of the book is incomplete and not in any known language. It could be argued it is a code, as it appears to be ancient Greek, but then, it looks Egyptian, too and—is that Aramaic? Intriguing enough in its own mystery, the introduction leaves more questions. The translation, you see, is incorrect. It isn’t spheres, but rather rites. This is a book of ten heavenly rites, of which the divine, the cosmos, the mind, nature, alchemy and astrology all interweave.

And most interestingly, the last line in the introduction is this:

"This is the prisca theologia."