Tombsayers, Tombspotters, Tombies; with the first Recovery vote open, this is a very exciting time. I share that excitement, and I don’t want to dampen it with alarmism, but I have a concern. A concern about the 59th Tomb, a part of House Shadow, GHOST.
{a note — please excuse the use of an outside site to host this - I’d have prefered to simply write this in the Discord channel, but I felt this was best to document the visual aspect of what I’d like to share}
GHOST, OBVERSE is Recovery proposal 000004, directed at GHOST. It appears to depict the other side of GHOST, in literal shadow, edges lit as the full illumination we are used to seeing bleeds from the opposite side, bouncing and refracting through the transparent elements of the Tomb.
The novelty of being able to see, for the first time, the dark side of a Tomb is intoxicating, but I worry it’s distracting us from a critical question.
“Obverse” can be taken to mean the front side of an object, such as a coin, or “heads” if you will. And indeed, the image we tend to consider the “front” of a Tomb, that which faces out of the void and towards us, would appear to be formed in the shape of *the back *of a particular, very rare MiniDisc, the TDK XA-PRO. When you search for real site examples of this form, you’ll find printed information such as the capacity, specifications, and operating instructions on the other side, the side most like what we see with GHOST, OBVERSE.
But “Obverse” has another, similar yet critically distinct meaning: “Facing or turned towards the observer”. If we are not the observer, who or what is?
When GHOST first changed hands, I made no secret of my suspicion that it was, for lack of a better term, haunted. I believe the existence of the GHOST, OBVERSE image proves this, that a presence in the void is observing GHOST from the far side. An Observer, toward which the true front of the Tomb is facing.
Since becoming aware of this situation, I’ve made the difficult decision not to immediately go forward with my own personal Recovery proposal in the first window out of caution. While we know next to nothing about the nature of this presence, I predict that it may be possible for it to use Recovery to spread to other Tombs, at least within House Shadow, which I’d consider to be the most susceptible House to this kind of symbolic incursion, dealing as it does with themes of “opacity, darkness, surveillance, visibility”.
If I’m correct, the outcome of this vote, which is on track to validate all of the proposals, may be the emergence and viral spread of more OBVERSE images, more disquieting reminders that something within the void looks out at us as we look in — A Void Presence, a Ghost Observer, a Shadow Contagion.
If you share my concern, please proceed through this voting window with caution, and watch the Tombs carefully.
As Gilbert often says, “this text is part of an occasional, unauthorised series set in an extended universe based on David Rudnick’s Tomb Series”