The Molecule of Eternity unfolds as a living prose—as yet verdant literary work revealing itself long prior to its final consolidation. Each serialised volume grants an exclusive communion with the live adaptation and uncovers the raw narrative in its nakedness and its dynamism.
You are invited to trace the elusive currents of inspiration and to witness the shifting architecture of the plot.
The Indie Novel
In the industrial settlement of Zavražje, entire families, together with all their records, vanish without trace. The surrounding world accommodates the nullification with dreadful ease. For Margarita Smolina, who bears the wound of this erasure, the mystery becomes the object of a lifelong intellectual inquiry. Her investigations lead towards a disturbing hypothesis: there must exist a force that can expunge the very conditions of all being—meaning, memory, reason, exchange—and mankind has already begun to assist it.
Drawn into a volatile alliance with the cynical inventor Maxim Podolsky, Smolina plunges into parapsychic realms, gathering along the way the most extravagant company of unowned scholars, sybils, spectres and yet other exiles. Meanwhile, Orensgrad, the administrative centre of the region encompassing Zavražje, grows increasingly estranged from reality.
Uniting speculative science, grotesquerie and philosophical satire, The Molecule of Eternity examines the precarious relation between intelligence and conscience, freedom and necessity, love and selflessness. Its inquiry bears upon whether civilisation may perish through collective indifference, whether evil is an intrusion or an inevitable term within creation, and whether a world that has renounced its own humanity retains any claim upon a future.
Yet the novel’s deepest sorrow lies in the cessation of the familiar world itself—in the imperceptible reduction of ordinary life to the damped oscillations of its pitiful remnants: fragmented, unfinished, forever left behind.
In the industrial recesses of Zavražje, entire families vanish without trace—no records remain; no voice is raised in distress. Margarita Smolina, the sole survivor of the silent nullification, is left with ever-aching scar of an existential abyss. The Expelled—a primordial entropic force—rides unbridled through the world, effacing the remains of human sanity.
As the Cosmos himself, poised on the precipice of erasure, stands motionless, some clandestine force—at the edges of perception—refracts and reassembles the visible world. Enigmatic entities encroach ever further upon the present day, now at variance with actuality: consciousness turning inwards, time folding upon its own recurrence, space braiding into impossibly tight knots.
On an estranged planet, suspended precariously between sterile logic and fevered dream, Smolina pursues the ethereal—perhaps, the last bastion of meaning. As personal loss, forbidden desire, and metaphysical rupture inflame, an unknown power draws her into a volatile entanglement with Maxim Podolsky—a cynical and capricious inventor. Together, they traverse the razor’s blade that separates reason from utter madness. Gothic reverie, spectral visitations, and frenzied geometry of hyperspace thus converge into a culmination… where the narrative abruptly fractures.
The Nine-Edged Mirror—inaugural volume of Isida Khan’s novel The Molecule of Eternity—unfolds as a series of grave and luminous narratives, spiced with crazed encounters, surreal metaphysical experiments, and rigorous speculative fiction. The trinity of chapters—A World Where Nothing Happens, A World Where Something Happens, and A World That Once Was—blend pitilessly elegiac prose, gothic gravity, and precise philosophic inquiry, rendering this work a deeply layered, mytho-philosophical odyssey.
This rather unusual composition is a clamorous and provocative exploration of identity, illusion, and the magnetic bond between man and machine. It is a descent into a dreamscape of lost cities, forlorn myths, and arcane technologies, where each character sends ripples upon fragile surface of tensed reality. Isida Khan crafts a masterpiece meant to carry the reader beyond the rim of mundane.
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.
A World That Once Was
In this culminating essay of The Nine-Edged Mirror, the narrative withdraws from the immediacy of present hour and enters a timeless domain of retrospection. The world is no longer merely observed—it is apace recalled, reimagined, and rekindled. Thus The Legend of King Hammurabi emerges as both genesis and fracture—an ancient account, likely dreamt, that recast the very cadence of history.
What forh unfolds is other than a mere chronicle; rather, the legend resolves into meditation upon antiquity glimpsed at the threshold of its vanishing: a heedless world poised between coherence and dissolution, between the divine calling and imminent undoing.
This whimsical tale of the ancient East serves as a governing axis within the greater cosmology of The Molecule of Eternity. The figures who traverse this magical landscape—kings, visionaries, wanderers—reverberate across epochs, binding past, present, and future into a single, unresolved continuum. Herein, within the persistent presence of cyclical law, the past, however distant, endures as a pattern, an echo, and a warning.
A World That Once Was stands, therefore, as the terminal aperture of the twisted cycles of the novel. As myth, science, and philosophy converge, the legend resolves into profound contemplation on the preludes to metamorphosis, on transitions inevitable yet premature, and the cost of awakening before the appointed hour. The legend gathers the dispersed threads from all essays to become a resonant alignment, carrying The Molecule of Eternity into the fatal flight of fancy.
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.
