And thus, unintentionally, you also confronted him with Anastasia. You could not trip in the Ninth House without falling over an Anastas, an Anastasia, or an Anastasius; or, in later years, bumping into their niche. Anastasia had been the mythic founding tomb-keeper and grandmother of the House, and the subject of at least two Nigenad poems (’Twas deep in Anastasia’s time, I wot). She was namesake of the deep inner monument where lay the sacred bones of tomb-keepers past and those who fell in battle. You were profoundly upset to learn that she had been real; that the rooms you inhabited—the
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