Skip to content
The Tarot Club
The sacred emblem of the Church of the Fool - the Eye of Secrecy, a pupilless eye wrapped in contorted lines beneath a crescent moon, rising from gray fog

A Fan Archive of the Gray Fog

Lord of the Mysteries

A chronicle of the world of Beyonders - of the twenty-two pathways, of the Tarot Club beneath the gray fog, and of the Fool who would end the Calamity - gathered for those who praise the Fool.

Enter the ArchiveSpot the Monocle

Praise the Fool

Overview

A world behind the fog

Lord of the Mysteries - the web novel by Cuttlefish That Loves Diving - drops its hero into Backlund, the fog-grey capital of the Loen Kingdom in the 5th Epoch. Its streets run on gaslight, steam, and a faith in the hidden. Behind the daily world a second reality runs parallel: the world of Beyonders.

Klein Moretti begins as a penniless fortune-teller and ends as the Fool, ascending a ladder of potions and rituals along one of the twenty-two pathways that weave the mysteries together. Around him grows the Tarot Club - a circle of the ambitious and the hunted who meet beyond the gray fog of Sefirah Castle to trade power, secrets, and trust.

These pages gather the church that rose around his name, the club he founded, the pathways that shape the world, and a chronicle of the story's eight volumes - and something of a game for those who would test their sanity against the Worm of Error.

22
pathways of the mysteries
ladders of potion and ritual
8
volumes in each book
from Clown to Fool - and on to the Circle
1349
Backlund, 5th Epoch
the fog-grey capital of Loen
Pathways

The twenty-two pathways

Beyonders gain power by drinking potions and rising through a fixed ladder of Sequences, along one of twenty-two pathways that run beneath the world. Each pathway is guarded by an authority and a set of symbols; to walk one is to accept its nature and its danger.

Pathway titles and authorities follow the commonly used fan translation, which varies by source; the last three are marked as source-varying.

The Fool

unconfirmed

Klein Moretti, the lord of the gray fog

Fate, secrecy, the puppetry of destinies and the Sefirah Castle.

The Error

unconfirmed

Amon, the Worm of Error

Theft, deception, and parasites that wear your life while you watch.

The Door

unconfirmed

The Gatekeeper of spaces

Travel, keys, and the borders between worlds.

The Sun

unconfirmed

The God of the Sun

Light, fire, purification against the corrupt.

The Tyrant

unconfirmed

The God of Storms

The sea, storms, and unmovable might.

The Hanged Man

unconfirmed

The Spirit World

Between life and death, and the truths that hang in that thin air.

The Emperor

unconfirmed

Dominion itself

Order, law, and the weight of a throne.

The Hermit

unconfirmed

Hidden knowledge

Mysticism and the secrets kept out of print.

The Justice

unconfirmed

Balance

Judgment, fairness, and the long arm of consequence.

The White Tower

unconfirmed

Intellect

Logic, knowledge, and the cold edge of reason.

The Wheel of Fortune

unconfirmed

Cycle

Fate, luck, and the turning of ages.

The Moon

unconfirmed

Blood and lineage

The kinship of the long-lived and the undead's hunger.

The Darkness

unconfirmed

The Evernight Goddess

Night, concealment, and what shadows are given to guard.

The Twilight Giant

unconfirmed

Frontier of decay

Strength, ruin, and the twilight before the long night.

The Red Priest

unconfirmed

War

Blood, dominion, and the furnace of conflict.

The Black Emperor

unconfirmed

Undeath

Tyranny and a throne raised on what does not die.

The Demoness

unconfirmed

Beguilement

Temptation, poison, and the knife that smiles.

The Devil

unconfirmed

Pacts

Deals, demons, and the price written in fine print.

The Abyss

unconfirmed

The deep corruption

The fallen, the sunken, and what waits at the bottom.

The Chariot

unconfirmed

Conquest

Force and momentum that crush what stands before it.

The Star

unconfirmed

Guidance

A light to steer by across dead seas.

The World

unconfirmed

Completion

The closing of a circle, the whole of a destiny.

Tarot Club

The circle beyond the gray fog

The Tarot Club convenes not in any city but on the gray fog of Sefirah Castle, where summoned members sit under codenames drawn from the Greater Arcana. It began as a single frightened fortune-teller testing how far trust would carry, and grew into a quiet engine of the world beneath the world.

Members exchange intelligence, coin, and favours across the vast distances of the continents, each answering to the Fool who presides from the highest seat. Klein himself moves among them - at first through his own hidden member, the World, and later openly as their patron.

The Fool

the founder and patron behind the gray fog

The Justice

Audrey Hall, a noble lady of Backlund

The Hanged Man

Alger, once a sailor of the open sea

The Sun

Derrick Berg, a knight of the City of Silver

The Magician

Fors Wall, a lady who writes

The Moon

Emlyn White, of a line that does not age

Identity notes follow common fan accounts and may not be exhaustive.

Church of the Fool

The sacred emblem

The Church of the Fool venerates the Fool as the true god of the mysteries - the lord above the gray fog, the owner of Sefirah Castle, and the patron of fate and secrecy whose true name is safest left unspoken. Its doctrine teaches that the highest truths are veiled, that the divine does not cheaply show its hand, and that some knowledge protects itself by being kept.

The emblem and the following notes follow fan accounts; exact liturgical wording is marked unconfirmed where it is.

The sacred emblem of the Church of the Fool - the Eye of Secrecy, a pupilless eye wrapped in contorted lines beneath a crescent moon, rising from gray fog

The eye of secrecy, wrapped in the contorted lines of change beneath a crescent crimson moon - the mark by which the faithful of the Fool know one another.

Doctrine, in brief

The Fool is praised as the lord above the gray fog, the possessor of Sefirah Castle, and the one who can see the threads of fate without being bound by them. His followers hold that the divine is veiled, that the mysteries guard themselves, and that humility before what is hidden is the beginning of wisdom. Specific prayers and catechisms are unconfirmed (fan account).

The Tarot Club connection

The Tarot Club is the church's living nerve. Its members venerate the Fool openly and trade in the club's name, and in the later years the club's work and the church's mission grow hard to separate - the Fool's circle, in both senses, answers to the same lord above the fog.

Praise the Fool

"Praise the Fool" is the greeting, the blessing, and the warning of the faithful - a phrase whispered across a table in Backlund, a line written under a seal, a small prayer before a dangerous bargain. It is said to shelter its speaker from eyes that would rather not know the Fool is watching. The exact invocation is unconfirmed (fan account).

Spot the Monocle

The Worm of Error hides in the fog

Somewhere in the crowd below, a single figure wears a monocle over its right eye. It could be a gentleman of Backlund, a loitering shadow, or a crow on the rail. Find it before the clock runs out - and before the corruption in your mind reaches its limit.

Round1Score0Time0s
Sanity0%
Spot the Monocle
In the fog-choked streets of Backlund, the Worm of Error is hiding. Click the figure whose right eye wears a monocle. Find 8 of them before the clock runs out - and mind your sanity: every wrong guess erodes it. A corrupted mind loses to the Marauder.
Volume Chronicles

The Archive

The complete chronicle in two books. Approach at your own peril: the later halves are kept behind the fog for your own sanity.

Spoiler warning. The chronicles below tell how the story of Lord of the Mysteries and Circle of Inevitability unfolds. The later volumes of Book One and all of Book Two are intentionally redacted - click any sealed card to reveal it, click it again to re-blur. Be honest with yourself: some entries are condensed from memory and are marked as fan-index, not confirmed synopsis.

Book One

Lord of the Mysteries

Eight volumes. The first four are open to the reader; Volumes Five through Eight stay sealed until you click them to reveal the spoilers.

  1. Vol. 01

    Clown

    Not confirmed against the full text - marked as a fan index

    The transmigrator in Backlund

    A clerk from our world wakes as Klein Moretti, a penniless fortune-teller in the fog-choked capital of Backlund in the 5th Epoch, year 1349. Stranded with the mysterious Sefirah Castle and its gray-fog meeting chamber, he scrapes a living by divination, is drawn into the hidden war of Beyonders, and advances from Seer to Clown on the Fool's pathway - learning that the 'beyond' is a ladder climbed one potion at a time, and that the gods above are not quite what the churches preach.

  2. Vol. 02

    Faceless

    Not confirmed against the full text - marked as a fan index

    A new face, a deeper game

    With his old life burned, Klein sheds one identity and steps further into the underworld of the Mysteries. The Nighthawks - the secret police of the Evernight Goddess - pull him into the most dangerous incidents in the capital as he walks the Seer path toward the Faceless, a Beyonder who can wear any countenance. Betrayal, possession, and a growing sense that something vast is watching the whole story from behind Sefirah Castle's fog.

  3. Vol. 03

    Traveler

    Not confirmed against the full text - marked as a fan index

    The borders of the world open

    Klein takes to the road and the sea, crossing the borders of the continent and, increasingly, the borders between worlds. The volume marks his shift from one corner of the world to another, and with it the widening of the conspiracy: the old powers that warred in earlier epochs have left marks on the present, and the path of the Fool is only one thread in a larger weave of fate.

  4. Vol. 04

    Undying

    Not confirmed against the full text - marked as a fan index

    Those who refuse to end

    The Undying: those who will not let death end them. Klein's arc turns toward the long-lived and the undying and the prices they pay, as the forces gathered around the Fool's path come into sharper conflict and the first hints of the calamity - the end every god fears - are spoken aloud. A volume about bodies that will not rot, and bargains that will not end.

Book Two

Circle of Inevitability

All eight volumes, every one sealed behind the fog. The sequel is condensed here from fan knowledge only and is not confirmed against the complete text; each entry is a tentative index rather than a synopsis. The later volumes are the most heavily redacted.