Wing VI of XII
Historical Mysteries
Conspiracies and enigmas we invented ourselves.
Newest in this wing
The Great Feline-Canine Prophecy of 1874
A Gabrovo clockmaker wakes from a thirty-one-hour fever able to describe a court with no floor — and a ballad about watches gone soft, set down fifty-seven years before anybody painted one.
Read the dispatchFrom the Wing's Archive
23 VII 2024
The Ming Dynasty's Quantum Physics Research
A silk roll out of Nanjing, twelve stanzas long, in which three Ming officials count nine bands of light on a floor, seal a cricket in a lacquer cage, and leave the Emperor asking where exactly he is.
6 VII 2024
The Chocolate Knights
An order of Spanish nobles said to have gone out at night in armour of solid chocolate — filed against a material that gives out three degrees below the temperature of the man wearing it.
4 VII 2024
The Medieval Quest for the Philosopher's Smartphone
Nine knights, a wizard's map, a wyrm on a gold field, and a glass that would not wake. The Bureau reads the ballad against the record and finds the working device was in the hero's belt pouch the whole way home.
27 VI 2024
The Viking Map to the Underworld
A sailing direction to the land of the dead, drawn on hide by a people who never drew the sea. Nine stanzas of saga, set beside Snorri, two ship burials and one exposed forgery.
13 VI 2024
The Roswell Incident of the 18th Century
Summer 1790: a burning sphere, a burnt acre, a farmer's cool metal, and two wagons that went to a place appointed. The Bureau finds no Rollandville in the census and no notice in any paper — and one detail in the account that 1790 would have thrown out for entirely the wrong reason.
14 II 2024
The Templar Knights and the Quantum Grail
A vessel reported at the Paris Temple in two places at once, guarded by brothers forbidden to look at it — and a Grail that nobody had yet troubled to write down.