THE SEVENTH LEAF
The King has begun work on a new garden and has asked for my assistance in obtaining some rare items. He has told me that this will be a gift to the Queen. But how can one gift a garden to another? How can one give a field to a friend or lend a portion of the sea to a debtor? Are not the leaves of a tree as the thoughts of a mind? Although I cannot understand this at all, I have not the courage to question the King and if I dwell on these things for too long I begin to feel a sickness in my heart. I confess this only to the stars, for my lament is not an apology. I cannot apologize for that which I do not understand.
– Sorren
“The Red King is sulfur and the White Queen is mercury. It is the chemical marriage. Does this man try to disguise such elemental references to the Philosopher’s Stone? So this time they are to be untied in a garden? This man Sorren admires his own cleverness to his own demise.”
The clear obsession of this man Melanthros, known as M, is visible in almost every leaf. This is rather curious to me. Nearly every leaf has some annotation to it, but it could not be more obvious to me that the servant Sorren is referring to an actual garden here, not a symbolic representation of a fiery alchemical furnace. I am vaguely familiar with some of the basic nomenclature of the noble art of alchemy, and it is true of what M speaks, but unless I am missing something here, or that there is an entirely new level of secret nomenclature beneath the first level, this could not be any more innocent. I have seen no evidence that King Sigmus was involved with alchemy of any kind, and in truth, the opposite is true, for the King hated sorcery of every kind. So what is Sorren really talking about? He may in fact be using alchemical symbolic language to describe another form of understanding, another form of literature perhaps. This would be evidence that Sorren is far more intelligent than so far appears in these assorted leaves, and that perhaps they are leading up to something.