The Zodiacal Platforms are twelve platforms, one per house of the zodiac, anchored to cities and regions across Antiterra. Placed long ago as safeguards, they form the Game of the Platforms: closing them shields the world against the power Jaxotot, but once all are complete no one can leave.
| Type | Place / system (twelve platforms) |
| World | Antiterra |
| Placed by | Herede(th) and (To)gras, through dual magic |
| Guardians | Two per platform, one malevolent and one benevolent |
| Status | Eleven closed; the last pending |
| Spanish entry | Plataformas Zodiacales |
Locations
- Virgo: London.
- Taurus: Rome or Louisiana (accounts differ). Rome “is one of the platforms and is nearby”.
- Aries: one guardian in Mexico and another in the north.
- Libra, Scorpio and Sagittarius are named in itineraries without location.
An axis runs between them: one can pass “from the initials of Scorpio to the axis of Sagittarius” and come back toward Taurus.
Description
“The platforms already exist and always existed”; what did not exist were the summoned guardians. They were placed as safeguards by Herede(th) and (To)gras (names reconstructed from “the secret of the dual magic of Graz’zt”, possibly misspelled) through dual magic.
A platform is engraved stone, with “runes driven in strong and intense”. In the caverns a platform has been seen hanging from chains. Platforms move in a controlled way, open and close; closing is described as “opening inward”. Each has inhabitants. A platform can be contaminated by demons, whose source must be found and cleansed. If its two guardians destroy each other, the platform and everyone living on it are destroyed.
The Game
The system is called the Game of the Platforms: “the seals are the planets, the platforms are the zodiac; but the combination of both is law and chaos” — the wandering planets and the structured zodiac. The seals, released in the powder magazines of Paris, unleash contingencies; the fixed platforms contain them.
- The first stage closes “by summoning all the guardians of the platforms”. Each platform has two guardians and is closed by summoning one of them.
- Each platform takes two hosts: “two per platform, 12 houses, 24 hosts”.
- Each platform opens every month; the full cycle lasts a year. Time runs independently in each house.
- Houses can be skipped: from Leo, having summoned the guardian of Aries, one can pass to Libra.
- The aim of the game is to reach the gem.
- The cycle must be closed without Jock Sotón inside it.
At present eleven are closed; of the last, one guardian has been summoned and the other not. Two of the twelve unknowns are already known and “will be the compass and the map to decipher all the others”.
The law of each house
Each platform imposes the law of its sign, and one fails there by that law.
- Aries: the start of the game; “violence without direction”, “impulse without meaning”. One fails by always reacting violently: “the one who dares without prudence ends up a victim of a mad, unbridled rage”.
- Leo: the alpha male, who is most powerful; things are fought “in subtleties, in local matters”.
- Taurus: wealth and fertility.
- Pisces: “the world of dreams, the underwater, mythology, but also confusion, and dissolution, liquefaction”.
Role
“The only defensive events have to do with the platforms, which are like safeguards.” Against Jaxotot: “if the platforms close, it may not get in”. But “when they are completed… no one can get out, that is the problem.”
The game is under way (“the boat is already moving”), and those who play try “to get ahead of the end of the game of the platforms”. Princess Kimchi was promised: “the platform will come back for you” — in a hundred years.
Conflicting accounts
- Duration. One tradition: each platform opens every month, “it’s a year”. Another: “in 100 years, princess Kimchi”.
- State. “The platforms have just closed” and “are already closed”; yet eleven are closed and the last is missing, and “the game is just starting, they’re in the first stage”.
- Start. The game “has begun” in Paris in 1717; it is also said to be installed in 1784 A.D.A.
Open questions
- Which signs occupy the seven unnamed platforms; which two are “the compass” and “the map”.
- What the gem is, where it is, and what reaching it gives.
- How the enclosure is undone once complete, and whether there is a way out.
- What a platform ultimately is: walkable inhabited stone, an axis to run along, or a power held by lineages (“they still keep the power of the platform of Taurus… they are most dangerous”).
- What the hosts are and how they are placed; whether the chained cavern platform and the wooden platform (the messenger’s carriage) belong to the system.
- What causes a house’s demonic contamination and how it is cleansed.