The New S.

In S. there are a few threads that on first reading needed further explanation, or at least that was our feeling when we read them.

One of these threads is prompted by the solution to the Chapter 4 cipher solution "Avoid Grand Central - key stolen - assume bag gone - I failed" This is FX Calderia trying to send Straka a message about a bag that was supposedly hidden in Grand Central Station in New York.

Now fast forward to the last few days, we talked about the activity of @MCrinitus on twitter, in relation to the discovery of the new chapter 10 alternatives and the page found from "The Winged Shoes of Emydio Alves"

The first part of this puzzle was a picture of a coin, which is Mercury (Winged Shoes link of course)

Then from @MCrinitus we had the cipher clues and once that was solved, the page from the Winged Shoes of Emydio Alves.

Around this time, possibly because of the first words of page 268 of TWSOEA "The statues look down on him", ‏@MyTheseus tweeted this picture of the outside of Grand Central Station where there is a statue of Mercury, @MCrinitus almost immediately retweeted that.

Almost immediately after we also got this tweet "We have taken from the defeated What they had to leave us - a symbol.", this quote is from a TS Eliot poem Little Giddings in a book called The Four Quartets, M Crinitus has been tweeting lots of small excerpts from these poems over the previous few days so the poems seemed very significant.

This is the full verse that goes with that quoted line -

Whatever we inherit from the fortunate
We have taken from the defeated
What they had to leave us — a symbol:
A symbol perfected in death.
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
By the purification of the motive
In the ground of our beseeching

Then this prompted ‏@MyTheseus to tweet this picture of the clock with four faces (quartets) inside Grand Central Station.

So we are now tying in to S. because of the Page 122 link, however now things are going further as we have the following passage from the same place that the alternative Chapter 10's came from -

I am not proud of what I have done or who I have become. Straka believes or believed, however you want to look at it, that everything can be rewritten, everything can be reborn. I'm not so sure.

There are threads that, when pulled, may unravel the entire tapestry. I, unknowingly, pulled such a thread. Then in my efforts to put it all back together I have become so entangled that I can barely move.

Let me explain. In order to see the birds it is necessary to become part of the silence, and I was very good at it. Somewhere in Time, I waited beside the clock with four faces and the Nightingale approached.

I had invested years of my life in reliable, unquestioning service. And I continued that service. I waited for the Nightingale to look away and I stole a key, part her soul, before fading back into the silence. I had done this before to various people in various ways. This time I made the mistake of looking back and seeing what I left behind.

As fate would have it, I was to deliver the key and the bag we had taken to the Château. But I remembered the Nightingale's panic and my curiosity got the better of me. I opened the bag.

It is one thing to see a book, just one story bound up and hidden. It is quite another to see an entire life all at once. Pictures, letters, notes, histories, stories. I still haven't read them all. But I began to see the birds for what they were, struggling and floundering as their ships filled with water. Fighting to reveal truth to the world in any way they could. Trying to keep those at the top from crushing those on the bottom. Fighting to change the world.

And I changed.

But what I have done can not be rewritten by what I do now. I have killed in cold blood. I have murdered, poisoned, even killed by defenestration, all for the man in the Château. Yet the blood is not on his hands. It is on mine.

All I can do is let you peak into the stolen bag in hopes that you may preserve at least some of it.

For the moment we are assuming "The Nightingale" is FXC, does this also mean the Château mentioned is Vevoda's Château, or as Tonzi in the comments points out, more likely Bouchard's Château ? Is this person then an agent that is now on the run from his former masters ?

There is one more small part to the events of the last few days that might fit in to this new chapter of S. we are discovering.

In amongst all this new activity over the last few days Doug Dorst released this picture on Twitter. It is of course a guitar chord, and after several attempts to decipher it's meaning the final concensus reached is that this is A flat diminished, or as it is more commenly written "Abdim".

Keen readers of S. will now make a connection, ok it took us a few minutes, but on page 248, the person who hands the valise to S. is Abdim

It is our supposition that this is directly related to the M Crinitus activity, as the bag in Grand Central is similar or even the same as the one S. receives.

So are you looking forward to taking part in the new journey of S. that has just started ?