Act Two - Lux Aeterna — Chapter 12

Over dinner, Isabella notices David’s gloom after the library visit and probes about Cristina. David deflects, then snaps, sending Isabella to her room in tears. Left alone, David reflects amid the freshly ordered study Isabella prepared, smokes one of her father’s contraband cigars, and opens a letter from his patron, Andreas Corelli, summoning him.

David meets Corelli atop the new port cable railway, fighting vertigo as Corelli delights in the view and teases him about fear. They board a cable car; Corelli critiques David’s week of reading academic commentary and urges direct engagement with sources, especially the Bible, calling theory “the practice of the impotent.”

As the car sways, Corelli insists that belief is irrelevant to their work; knowledge matters. He praises the Bible as a great story and distinguishes divine truth from the “missal industry.” Unnerved, David asks to disembark at the mid-tower, and they continue the conversation on a bench by the port.

Corelli explains that fables and sacred texts teach through narrative, not lectures. He directs David to study primary myths and epics—the Brothers Grimm, Aeschylus, the Ramayana, Celtic legends—analyzing how they evoke emotion and extracting their narrative grammar rather than their morals.

Finally, Corelli sets the deliverable: in two or three weeks, David must bring the beginning of an original story that makes Corelli “believe.” The meeting clarifies the commission’s focus on storycraft over doctrine and sets a concrete, high-stakes creative task for David.