Let Me Ascend

When the Hierarch of a fractured Pacific Northwest Consilium dies of causes that do not fit his physiology, the Awakened community he governed begins tearing itself apart — three Orders, one power vacuum, and a question nobody wants to ask aloud about what he found in the moments before he died. Into this, almost incidentally, steps Culthul A'scar. He holds no official rank. He attends every meeting. He votes with careful procedural conscientiousness and goes home afterward to make tea and look at the rain. The Silver Ladder lists him as one of their own. Nobody looks at him twice. Nobody knows that Culthul A'scar exists at the level the Watchtowers point toward but cannot name — a being of I source of everything, for whom the Orders are taxonomy, the Lie is a narrative function, and the entire architecture of the World of Darkness is a constructed system he sees completely and has chosen, deliberately and genuinely, to walk inside anyway. He chose humanity. He chose wanting. He chose to care about this city and its petty institutional fractures and its dead Hierarch who was brave enough to look over the edge of everything and write down what he found there. Now someone wants that finding buried. Culthul A'scar has decided it should not be. Let Me Ascend is a political thriller about power, institutional corruption, and the most sovereign act available to an infinite being — the choice to show up, to attend, to care about outcomes that do not require your caring. It is about what a man was before he became what he is, and whether the distance between those two things can ever be crossed in the direction of return.