William Blake is the emissary Lucifer sent to the companions to seal the Regulators’ old pact — refuge in exchange for Barbatos; he brought the newborn Refuge World in a glass marble and took away the key of Avernus and Barbatos’s head.
| Type | Character (emissary) |
| Master | Lucifer |
| Chronicle | CFA (Cairo arc) |
| Spanish entry | William Blake, el Emisario |
Description
A man with tousled white hair and hands stained with ink and paint to the wrist, offering in his palm a glass marble with a solar system lighting up inside. Under his other arm, a portfolio of engravings, one showing a ring-shaped city that has not yet happened. Behind him the press, and further back a door of fire open like any door. His gaze is kind and cannot be held. “He brought a solar system in his palm and a key in his pocket. He received a head in exchange.”
The pact
The marble was the proof that Lucifer had kept his side: a whole new primary growing inside it. Blake took in exchange the key of Avernus and, as trophy of the deal, the severed head of Barbatos.
The book already written
In another world and century the voice of Blake wrote The Book of Thel — the virgin who looks over the edge of incarnate life and turns back. That name is borne by Thel, who was Lady of Pain; and the poem’s motto — “does the eagle know what is in the pit?” — is engraved on a living blade of the cycle, the katana that bears her name. The emissary draws visions that come true; the archive suspects, uneasily, that he also writes them, and that some come true with centuries of patience.