In this combined edition of The Nine-Edged Mirror, the first eight narratives coalesce into a profound philosophical tapestry, chronicling the inexorable awakening of Margarita Smolina’s hypercosmic vision amid the crumbling veils of reality.
From the elegiac stillness of “Zavražje Reset” and the psychical obsessions of Circuit Break, through the ghostly entanglements of His Name Was Kay and the surreal allegories of The Deal, to the mythic revelations of The Wall of Fire, the temporal convolutions of 20 Knots or the Hypermandala, the carnivalesque disruptions of A Glitch in the Matrix, and the quantum precipices of The Event Horizon—these essays interweave biographical introspection, speculative metaphysics, and gothic folklore into an adventurous voyage, through which science confronts fable, isolation yields to cosmic entanglement, and the Expelled looms as an eternal antagonist to memory and meaning.
Imbued with Bulgakovian whimsy and Edwardian elegance, Volumes I & II form both an intellectual labyrinth and a lyrical invocation, mirroring the frictions between existential longing, profound solitude and mythic inevitability. A World Where Nothing Happens merges seamlessly into A World Where Something Happens, propelling The Molecule of Eternity towards its luminous core, and granting readers an intimate portal into a living manuscript fraught with enigma, tenderness, and ontological daring.
Alongside the core narratives, this edition enfolds exclusive lyrical fragments, appendices, and reflections destined to vanish from the final novel.
Volume I of The Nine-Edged Mirror gathers the first four narratives—Zavražje Reset, Circuit Break, His Name Was Kay, and The Deal—into a singular philosophical arc, tracing the gradual unfolding of Margarita Smolina’s enigmatic worlds.
From the haunting industrial silence of Zavražje to the daring neural experiments of Maxim Podolsky, from the spectral dialogue with Kay to the surreal theatre of The Deal, these narratives intricately intertwine metaphysical inquiry, psychological complexity, and mythic symbolism. Each story unveils a different facet, a new dimension, of the novel’s evolving cosmology.
Infused with elegiac lyricism and philosophical rigour, Volume I is both an intellectual voyage and a poetic journey, serving as a narrative mirrorr that reflects the tensions between science, myth, and the ineffable forces that shape human existence. A World Where Nothing Happens marks the first step towards the full vision of The Molecule of Eternity, offering readers a living, breathing manuscript charged balances intimacy, mystery, and intellectual audacity.
Alongside the narrative chapters, the volume includes exclusive lyrical fragments and essays that will not appear in the final novel.
The Nine-Edged Mirror, Volume II
A World Where Something Happens
Volume II of The Nine-Edged Mirror assembles the subsequent four narratives—The Wall of Fire, 20 Knots or the Hypermandala, A Glitch in the Matrix, and The Event Horizon—into a cohesive philosophical progression, charting the intensifying convergence of Margarita Smolina’s metaphysical explorations with the encroaching disruptions of a hypercosmic order.
From the surreal nocturnal visions overlaying psychological entanglements with ancient legends of cataclysmic renewal in The Wall of Fire to the fevered urban distortions and esoteric pursuits of temporal recursion in 20 Knots or the Hypermandala, from the carnivalesque unraveling of domestic absurdities laced with gothic omens and unspoken longings in A Glitch in the Matrix to the Soviet archival records of anomalies interwoven with quantum metaphysics and citywide ontological glitches in The Event Horizon, these narratives deftly interlace speculative cosmology, emotional turmoil, and folkloric mysticism. Each installment reveals an escalating layer, a deeper stratum, of the novel’s burgeoning hypercosm.
Suffused with gothic whimsy and conceptual precision, Volume II constitutes both a speculative odyssey and a lyrical meditation, functioning as a prismatic reflector that captures the frictions between reason, fable, and the cosmic antagonists that govern existential coherence. A World Where Something Happens signifies the pivotal advancement towards the complete realisation of The Molecule of Eternity, presenting readers with a vibrant, pulsating codex imbued with tension, enigma, and philosophical daring.
Alongside the narrative chapters, the volume incorporates exclusive lyrical fragments and appendices that will not feature in the final novel.
Step into the world of “Molecule of Eternity” and meet its enigmatic protagonist, Margarita Smolina. In this short video, Margarita speaks for herself—revealing the origins, motivations, and mysteries behind her story.
“Zavražje Reset”
The inaugural essay in The Nine-Edged Mirror introduces the haunting intellectual world of Margarita Smolina, a solitary researcher whose tragic family legacy in the enigmatic industrial settlement of Zavražje propels her into the metaphysical fringes of science.
Amidst the phenomenon locally whispered as the ‘Zavražje Reset’ — a systemic erasure cloaked in silence and speculation — Margarita’s journey evolves into a philosophical odyssey through trauma, memory, and quantum consciousness. Navigating post-Soviet scientific institutions and shadowed metaphysical territory, she formulates a radical hypothesis: that a mysterious cosmological force — the Expelled — acts as a universal antagonist to structure, memory, and meaning.
Infused with elegiac prose and precise conceptual language, the essay constructs a deeply layered narrative across several registers: biographical realism, speculative cosmology, and critical metaphysics. Smolina’s thesis — that the human soul may function as a last bastion of ontological coherence against this cosmic deletion — catalyses her quiet rebellion against both empirical orthodoxy and philosophical defeatism.
In this second essay of The Nine-Edged Mirror, Isida Khan deepens the metaphysical dissection of consciousness, perception, and memory through the evolving relationship between two enigmatic figures: the emotionally fractured scientist Maxim Podolsky and the intellectually imperious researcher Margarita Smolina.
As the boundaries between cognitive science, mysticism, and technological transcendence blur, Podolsky’s invention — a neural mapping interface — becomes a portal into the mercurial states of consciousness. What begins as scientific inquiry rapidly devolves into existential disintegration, emotional obsession, and a surreal confrontation with what may be… a sovereign Intelligence, not born of human design.
Smolina’s sharp insight and cryptic detachment intensify the tension, portraying a woman who embodies both myth and logic, and the aesthetics of unknowability.
Their dynamic, charged by unspoken longing and mirrored isolation, gives rise to a conceptual ‘circuit break’ — a philosophical breach where the artificial and natural, the observed and the observer, collapse into each other.
EPUB, 52p.
In this third essay of The Nine-Edged Mirror, the narrative shifts into a lyrical, dreamlike exploration of spiritual perception and otherworldly encounters. At its heart is Sofia—a clairvoyant young woman reared under the fierce guardianship of her formidable grandmother, a matriarch deeply immersed in mysticism. Sofia’s innate ability to perceive beyond the veil of the tangible world brings her face-to-face with Kay, an enigmatic, spectral figure who claims an unbreakable bond with Margarita Smolina.
The essay unfolds as a nocturnal drama, dissolving the fragile boundaries between dream and reality, life and death. Through Sofia’s eyes, we enter an atmospheric and surreal confrontation with Kay—a mysterious presence who embodies longing, inevitability, and the shadowed attraction to the unknown. His connection to Margarita suggests both a metaphysical love story and a profound struggle over the integrity of her soul.
Blending elements of gothic romance, esoteric folklore, and philosophical contemplation, His Name Was Kay examines the subtle interplay between the visible and invisible realms. It continues the broader cosmological and metaphysical themes introduced in The Molecule of Eternity, weaving together intimate human emotions with mythic archetypes and the enigmatic forces that govern all earthly existence.
The Nine-Edged Mirror, Part IV: The Deal
The Deal is a richly layered philosophical novella that merges speculative science, existential inquiry, and theatrical surrealism into a single narrative thread. Set within the evolving cosmology of The Molecule of Eternity, this fourth instalment of The Nine-Edged Mirror series pivots away from earlier analytical clarity and descends into increasingly dreamlike, allegorical depths.
In this haunting episode, Isida Khan blurs the boundaries between reality and illusion, mind and algorithm, human essence and otherworldly sentience. The Deal follows Margarita Smolina and her miraculous AI assistant whose evolution from algorithm to self-aware entity challenges our deepest assumptions about identity and consciousness. While the story begins in the sterile corridors of an Institute, it quickly dissolves into a surrealist theatre of dreams, lost cities, spectral forces, and poetic absurdities.
Meanwhile, shifting figures like Tak-Tak and the ghosts of forsaken chapel of Saint Maurice introduce gothic and folkloric elements that saturate the story with mystery and metaphysical tension.
In this mytho-philosophical essay, the reader is led into a surreal nocturnal vision that overlays the psychological entanglements of two gifted researchers—Margarita Smolina and Maxim Podolsky—with a cosmological riddle: an eternal full moon, a ‘Spider’ firewall guarding the human mind, and a metaphysical current sweeping into the scene. Set against the backdrop of cognitive experimentation and arcane lore, this piece explores the fraught, magnetic bond between human and machine, earth and cosmos, lover and stranger.
In parallel, Sofia Vasilevsku—the jeweller of souls—undertakes a scholarly quest into a forbidden manuscript chronicling the ‘The Secret Code of the Fall and the Renewal’. There she restores the true contour of an ancient legend: what unfolds is a myth of cataclysmic transformation and sacrificial awakening—a primal creature casting itself into the abyss to ignite a new epoch. Through the legend, the essay explores the crisis preceding evolution, the divine symmetry of hypercosmic architecture, and the burden of carrying memory across thresholds of time.
The Wall of Fire stands as a turning-point—a meditation upon the peril of cognition when it overleaps its natural bounds, and upon the sacred exchange between human and cosmic intelligences. It joins science with myth, experiment with revelation, carrying The Molecule of Eternity to the edge where reason passes into fable—and the night itself begins to speak.
In this sixth essay of The Nine-Edged Mirror, the narrative descends into a fevered Orensgrad, where the phantasmagoric city becomes a crucible for converging minds and collapsing certainties; and where the heat, hallucination, and metaphysical compulsion fuse into a single, airless chamber of experience, pressing Margarita Smolina and Maxim Podolsky into a volatile orbit. Beneath these distortions of common theatre of the real, lies Smolina’s esoteric pursuit of a hyperdimensional calendar whose geometry threatens to recast causality itself.
In due course, Smolina’s domestic breakdown soon reveals itself as a cosmological threshold—the cause of the disturbances being an emerging comprehension of a primordial truth. The claustrophobic flat becomes an antechamber to a greater geometry, where each tremor hints at a universe folding in upon an undisclosed design.
Interwoven with these earthly dramas is the long, sorrowful vigil of Kay, whose myth moves through the essay as a counter-melody, casting an otherworldly radiance upon the present events.
20 Knots or the Hypermandala stands as one of the cycle’s most intricate meditations—a study of cognitive rupture, temporal recursion, and the destructive tenderness binding its two extraordinary minds. It extends the reach of The Molecule of Eternity toward a luminous verge, as scientific reasoning strains yet further against mythic inevitability. And thereupon, the hidden architecture of the hypercosm begins, at last, to glimmer through the thinning veil of the visible world.
At the seventh edge of The Nine-Edged Mirror, the narrative immerses itself in the unraveling domesticity of Maxim Podolsky, whose daily life, bereft of Margarita Smolina’s acerbic presence, devolves into a carnival of absurdities and metaphysical disquiet. The once-mundane flat becomes a sentient antagonist: kitchens erupt in manic activity, serpents hiss from book spines, and spectral silhouettes parade through the walls, all meticulously chronicled in Podolsky’s wry compendium of universal follies.
As Podolsky spirals into feverish inertia, his schnauzer Tak-Tak emerges as a garrulous companion—part canine familiar, part ancient entity echoing primordial depths—urging a reconciliation, his exhortations laced with mysterious undertones. Parallel to this, Margarita navigates her own liminal state, entertaining the attentions of the steadfast entrepreneur Oleg Makhovoy, only for dreadful omens—a frenzied rook, cascading misfortunes—to thwart their tentative alliance, suggesting the interference of an unseen rival’s hand.
Infused with gothic whimsy and folkloric vestiges—from Romanian tales of nocturnal bridegrooms to Slavic dualities of order and chaos—the essay probes the fractures in perception, the corrosive force of unspoken affections, and the hypercosmic ‘glitches’ that rapture causality itself. It advances The Molecule of Eternity into ever more dreamlike realms, where ontological solitude confronts mythic inevitability, and the boundaries of the self dissolve amid the architecture of an encroaching otherworld.
In this eighth part of The Nine-Edged Mirror, the narrative plunges into the shadowed annals of a 1963 Soviet geological expedition to the anomalous marshes of Karelia, where a seasoned team of scientists encounters inexplicable pheno-mena, blurring the boundaries between earthly ore and cosmic intrusion.
Interwoven with this archival chronicle is Margarita Smolina’s contemporary odyssey through a feverish Orensgrad beset by magnetic anomalies—the eerie beginning with a spectral encounter at a tram stop, evoking the forgotten histories, unheeded prophecies, and mythic parables of swallowed suns and golden ages; the vanishing of the river of time coinciding with citywide maladies mimicking radiation sickness, hormonal upheavals, and atopic epidemics afflicting nearly everyone—and culminating in Smolina’s groundbreaking treatise on the Fundamental Information Node, a hyperdimensional quantum particle of flawless spherical symmetry, exhibiting extreme density, bio-quantum coherence, non-local entanglements, and the dynamic informational stasis that challenged prevailing paradigms of consciousness, genetic encoding, ontological isolation, and the interplay between the Universe and the Expelled.
The maddening blend of archival realism with speculative quantum metaphysics, and gothic folklore—from Karelian bugbears to Slavic fairytales of unclean forces, and, further, to surreal tableaux of cosmic reckoning—the essay probes the event horizon where empirical inquiry meets mythic revelation, advancing The Molecule of Eternity towards a precipice of irreversible transformation, where the past’s buried secrets foreshadow a hypercosmic reckoning for its isolated protagonists amid an encroaching cascade of universal glitches.
The novel The Molecule of Eternity is a grand artistic work that blends philosophy, science, mysticism, and psychology. We have worked on this project step by step, starting with the conceptual development of the world and characters, delving into philosophical and scientific aspects, and shaping a unique artistic structure.
“Today, I do not change the future. I restore the justice of the past, so that it, carrying me in the present, will guide me further — to where the future still exists.”
Genre: Philosophical Science Fiction, Magical Realism, Existential Thriller.
Themes: Annihilation of consciousness, memory and oblivion, the limits of the mind, the human soul, artificial intelligence, and quantum uncertainty.
Isida Khan is an independent writer and researcher with a background in sociology. Her work examines the relations between consciousness and mind, how individuals apprehend reality, and the nature of truth.
Drawing on systems thinking, she explores character, volition, and moral orientation through symbolism and layered metaphors. Her writing strikes a delicate balance between science and philosophy, realism and mysticism, crafting multidimensional worlds where the boundary between the imagined and the real grows elusive.
The Molecule of Eternity is her first major work, blending elements of philosophy, magical realism, and speculative science.
