Story Premise

From Grimoire

The key to this story lies with Johannes Trithemius.

Consider: at age 20, Johannes Trithemius, enroute to his home from his university, is caught in a freak snowstorm and forced to take shelter in the Benedictine abbey of Sponheim. A clever and well-off man, a student of the magical arts as well as of the things taught him at University, he suddenly decides to derail his trip home permanently: he decides instead to stay at the abbey, and is elected its abbot the next year, at the ripe age of 21. He remains there for almost 25 years.

His greatest achievement during that time is to transform the abbey into a place of learning; its library grew from fifty items in 1483 to over two thousand in 1506 -- a massive stockpile of knowledge by the measure of the time. However, his single-minded pursuit of knowledge is more and more discomfiting to the convent at the abbey, and eventually they have him kicked out because of his reputation as a magician. Clearly, his accumulation of knowledge is not entirely beatific.

This is borne out by several clues, but one in particular leads us to our mystery. In Trithemius's hallmark work on cryptography, Polygraphia, published in 1518 -- long after he left the abbey at Sponheim -- he uses a curious alphabet, something he calls the Theban Alphabet and ascribes to a medieval 13th century occult scholar known as Honorius.

Curiously, there is another important work ascribed to Honorius, though Trithemius himself is silent on this fact: the Liber Juratus, a medieval grimoire of exceeding detail and unquestioned influence, was penned by the same man who devised the Theban Alphabet -- someone Trithemius was obviously familiar with.

And thus we have an answer to the question: Why did Trithemius stay at Sponheim despite the growing unrest and the anger of the convent?

Simple: Trimethius discovered, at the Abbey at Sponheim, the original, if incomplete, copy of the Liber Juratus. Trithemius would happily spend the next quarter century of his life collecting copies of the grimoire, bringing them to the abbey and comparing them with his original in order to try to piece together the now fragmented work.

When Trithemius realized that the last secrets were beyond even his scholarship, he searched for an heir to the mystery; when he was contacted by Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa in 1510, only 6 years before his death, he knew he had found that heir, and bestowed the sum of his research and learning to the young occultist.

Agrippa himself studied the grimoire, but found himself distracted by his own successes at court, and never quite managed to penetrate its deepest secrets. He, too, found a suitable heir to the mystery in Johann Weyer, but before he could turn the knowledge over, the grimoire and Trimethius's research was stolen by another occultist, Guy Vachon, while Agrippa languished in exile. Agrippa took deathly ill, and charged Weyer with recovering the grimoire before it could be used to ill purpose.

Weyer, suddenly without either master or inheritance, struggled to make ends meet; while he found employment as a doctor, he never forgot his master's charge. Unable to find the tome on his own, he made a last, desperate effort to attract another who could take up the quest. He succeeded, and that man, Weyer's student, is the hero of our story, the man who will ultimately find the Liber Juratus.

Where, then, did the grimoire go?

Guy Vachon experimented for years with the Liber Juratus, moving to England early on as it was apparent the English would be more tolerant of his exploration into the occult than the French. His few successes proved to him that the grimoire held vast power, but as his education was not nearly as complete as that of Agrippa or Trithemius, his failures were many. By 1575, he was rich, but decrepit and old; although even his weak magic had helped to keep him from dying of old age, his skin was withered and his bones brittle, and even he began to realize that he would need help unlocking the book's dark secrets.

To that end, he took a small orphan under his wing and, using his now immense wealth, had him instructed in the darkest, blackest arts from an early age. The young boy, Ananias Dare, proved a shockingly fast study, and within just a few years the child was showing a mastery over the knowledge in the Liber Juratus that even Vachon began to fear, and the two came more and more in conflict over the uses of the grimoire. Vachon, realizing his peril, tried to keep the book from the boy's hands, but their pull on Ananias was too great. Much as Trithemius and Agrippa had realized with their constant study, Ananias also came to the conclusion that the Liber Juratus was incomplete, that a key magical construct was somehow hidden between the lines of the book's pages, awaiting only the right key to be unlocked, and he craved the power of the grimoire's spidered pages above all else.

In 1582 Vachon and Dare had their last conflict; Vachon reprimanded the boy, now more a man, for having stolen the grimoire from its locked cabinet, and in return Ananias simply undid the crude preservation magics Guy had used to keep himself alive. Guy's dry husk collapsed, lifeless, in the space of a heartbeat, and in that moment Ananias became Guy's sole inheritor.

Given free reign, Ananias used the powers of the grimoire heedlessly, scrying his future to learn what his path should be. In doing so, his clouded visions revealed that his future would be bound up with that of Eleanor White, daughter of John White. He proposed marriage soon thereafter, and they were married in 1583. He hid his occult learnings well from his new family, and they suspected nothing of his ulterior motives; though their presence was stifling to him, he knew the visions of the Liber would lead him to power, and so he bode his time in mundane family life.

When John returned from Roanoke and relayed his tales of the island and its inhabitants, Ananias became convinced that the tome's darkest secrets would at last be unlocked in the new world. He proposed to John White that he and Eleanor join him in the new world, and John White named Ananias one of the colony leaders, so strong was his conviction that this young man had the qualities necessary to lead the colonists in this dangerous new world.

Among Dare's papers, of course, came a locked metal box, containing the stolen Liber Juratus.

They landed on Roanoke in 1587; Ananias and Eleanor had a daughter, Virginia Dare, the first child born to an Englishman in the New World. John White left the colony in what he believed to be good hands soon after, to return with men and supplies soon after.

And the rest, as they say, is history.