APPENDIX B: The Book of Inverted Shadows, page 751

...thus the light is nothing more than that wintry landscape of memory whose absence is all shadow and a profound awareness of the infinite spaces surrounding us on all sides. Within this space we remain suspended only with aid of strings that quiver with our hopes and our horrors, and which keep us dangling over the dark void. To seek the light is to defend such puppetry, condemning any efforts to strip us of the strings. The reason is nothing more enticing, and more vitally idiotic, than the desire to have a name -- even the name of a pathetic little puppet -- and to hold on to this name throughout the long ordeal of our lives as if it could be held onto forever. To keep those precious strings from growing frayed and tangled, if only we could keep from falling into an empty sky, we might continue to pass ourselves off under our assumed names and perpetuate our puppet’s dance through all eternity.

And so it should be that after undergoing certain ordeals -- whether ecstatic or abysmal -- we should be obliged to change our names, as we are no longer who we once were. Instead the opposite rule is applied; our names linger after anything resembling what we were, or thought we were, has disappeared entirely. There was nothing much there to begin with -- only a few questionable memories and impulses drifting about as snowflakes in a grey and endless winter. But each soon floats down and settles into a cold and nameless void.

I walked the Lands of the Dead until I reached the Sea of Eden, and then I discovered the secrets of the Tenebrous Formula, and then I was Dadga Hazareth no longer.

In the next chapter we shall discuss the Signs and Thresholds.