The Pillars of Divinity

Vena Veritas—the vein of truth. One drop of that blood is to venture into the mind of God.

I only know a couple of faces at the clubhouse, mostly other students from classes we share. The lights are low—flickering electric candles—and gold panels split the room like a heat sink. Bodies lean in close on cream upholstery, and fingertips play softly on skin.

I smile my best “don’t mind me” smile and shuffle through the crowd, trying to act casual while the whole time pretending to check my phone. Cilicia slides her way across the room toward me.

“Daisaku, you made it!”

She dresses almost gothic, only more refined—like a princess gone to the dark side. An angel in black. Tonight, she wears crushed velvet, a midnight-blue top laced tight across her chest that sighs with every breath. Just a slip beneath it, I hope.

“It’s good you’re here,” I say, shrugging.

The nickname Daisaku was one she’d given me—a character from an old anime series she was into. The other kids had started calling me that, too. But it was fine. I preferred it to my real name.

“I didn’t think I’d get past the lobby. You should’ve seen the way that doorman looked at me.”

She laughs, then takes a lick from her glass of Chablis. For a second, I wish my blood were the liquid in the glass. Could she take a sip of my soul?

“Thanks for getting me in,” I go on, trying to hold eye contact.

“No big deal. I don’t exactly get many chances to hang out with you. If any of the faculty turn up, act like you’re not here, okay? We’re meant to be all hush-hush about this.”

“I mean, it is supposed to be a secret society, right?”

“You bet your ass it is.”

We sit on the lounger for a while and talk, but never really get a real conversation going. Every minute or so, some guy or other in a buttoned-down Gucci shirt—all paisley and pin-striped—comes over. Was there even one drop of mixed blood in this place?

There are times when I feel more Vietnamese than British, especially in places like this. Although I think that side is where I get my real intelligence from. Despite mẹ tôi—mum—never learning English until my father married her, I glimpse that intelligence sometimes, buried deep within her, like a seedling that never found the light.

Out of nowhere, Cilicia stands, grabs my hand, and pulls me up.

“C’mon, I’ve something to show you.”

We swerve back through the people to this little private room, and once the door is shut and we’re alone in the silence, all I can feel is my heart fluttering about like a bird against a pane of glass. Cilicia adjusts her skirt over her thigh as she bends down to take something out of the little mirrored cabinet beneath the rattan table.

“You need to try this.”

Inside the trinket box is a syringe. I flinch. “Is that—?”

“Relax—a pinprick is all.”

I try to object, but being alone with Cilicia is all I dream of. Overwhelming almost—like being drawn into the centre of a whirlpool.

“I’m not sure about drugs and all that.”

“It’s not drugs—better.”

The syringe contains some weird glowing liquid, shimmering cobalt blue, that swirls like ink in water. A pinprick. I feel it creep, inch by inch, up my arm and to every sharp edge of my body. Everything snaps into focus. As if I've just bitten the fruit of Eden and can see the world naked.

Back in the main room, the first thing I notice is the couple by the drinks table. They stand together, but the guy’s attention keeps flicking toward other women. As her fingers tear tiny squares into a napkin, she is thinking what it would be like to sleep with his best friend.

In the corner, a lanky kid in a Cambridge-blue blazer leans too close to a first-year with scratches on her arm and a nervous laugh, nodding a half beat too quickly. The first-year is already failing her classes, and is considering whether the boy might be her only future.

On one of the settees, two girls I know from Applied Mathematics sit thigh to thigh wearing beaded friendship bracelets. One of them is in love with the other. The other knows and pretends not to.

I look at Cilicia, her lips are still red from the Chablis. She’s already thinking ahead, beyond this place, beyond me.

The effects of the stuff last for days. I consume whole textbooks in an hour or so, complete essays I’ve been chewing on, and finally crack those trigonometry assignments. As simple as adding one plus one.

Revelations appear before me. A stream of seemingly unconnected events becomes a through-line of cause and effect.

I see the first caveman press his handprint into stone, watch Botticelli and da Vinci meticulously bring light to the Renaissance, and get lost in the chromatic chaos of the surrealist stuff—Degraf and Shimoda. I understand it all as if I were there, creating those artworks myself with a paintbrush in hand.

Afterwards, I can’t get hold of Cilicia. I try calling her and leave a bunch of messages—up to the point I start to feel desperate. There’s a rumour she’s dating one of the professors, what’s-his-name with the tweed jacket from Political Science.

“Do the returns, then lock up for the night,” Trish says to me.

She’s the head librarian and the one who recommended me for the part-time position, as I’m in here studying most days anyway. Father’s company has been struggling a bit recently, and the extra cash from the job helps.

“I was just wondering,” I ask, flicking through a book of poems after finding nothing of note in the first few pages. “Only, I was looking into some of the famous people who studied here.”

Trish takes off her glasses and wipes the lenses with a cloth. “Newton, Oppenheimer, Darwin and Turing… even Schrödinger and all those physicists of the Quantum Era have studied in this very library.”

She wears the type of glasses you’d expect a librarian to wear—wire-rimmed and usually perched on her nose. Her hair is as coarse and grey as a ball of cat fur. Bet she’s as old as some of the books in here.

It’s staggering, really, how many scholars have come from this establishment. Artists who have created images no one even dreamed of before, biologists who unlocked the secrets of life, and physicists who’ve completely altered our understanding of the universe.

“And they were all part of that society, too, the Pillars of Divinity?” I ask.

“I don’t know where you heard about all that…” Trish says. “Best not to pay much heed to it.”

She leaves shortly after we’ve done the returns. I reach up from the ladder, slipping the last book away—an early edition of Dante’s Inferno—into its place on the highest shelf of the special collections. That’s when I notice them—the basement keys. Trish must’ve set them there on the book cart while tidying.

A temptation too good to refuse.

For hours, it seems, I stumble around those cold tunnels, emergency lights buzz and waver in jaundiced yellow. Then a door. Like bones rattling, the old key turns in the lock, and the heavy wood creaks open, revealing a dome-shaped stone prison. I hold my breath.

There it was.

Chains bind it to two cracked pillars, and a metal cage—Faraday-style—arches the walls. A round hole like a chimney runs all the way up to the sky, letting in a dim shaft of light. The thing shimmers—or more like, it refuses to be completely seen—shifting. A face, but also not. Muscular and feminine, strong and beautiful, all at once.

Its long, pale torso is wrapped tightly in bandages, stained in patches of Prussian blue, and its wings curl, dirtied and broken, like a fledgling fallen from its nest.

What is this creature? Why would someone do this?

But I already know. I can almost read its mind. It screams in song, hymns drawn from heaven’s well.

A clear plastic tube twists from its arm to a glass beaker, half-full of that gleaming blue liquid. Vena Veritas—the vein of truth.

What kind of twisted ritual did this? Some messed-up experiment? Had they bound it in those first days, built the academy atop its suffering, and fed on its power? Whatever it is, I have the feeling it’s unbalanced something, like a fracture in the normal order of things.

Outside the Cambridge library, on the front façade of this building, there’s a big gold clock—the Chronophage. No hands, no numbers, just a spinning gold disc. And sitting right there on top of the rim is this demon-like thing, eating up each second as it turns.

I’m only now grasping its meaning. Time is something forced upon the world. Built, standardised and mechanised. Our spirits swallowed by every tick.

Jolting against the chains, the creature blinks its eyes, then opens them wide—deep voids revealing far-off constellations. It lets out its cry, a sound that pierces bone, like the cries of the children of the mad King Herod.

I want to run, but something stops me. Tell me, what am I supposed to do?

Should I unlock the chains and kneel beneath the wings of this angel as it takes flight back to the heavens? Or keep it imprisoned here, draw a vial of its blood, my own little taste of the divine?

Footsteps sneak up behind me, and comforting arms drape over my shoulders. Cilicia. She whispers in soft breath—

“As long as we look away, our sins stay clean.”