There are moments in a book where everything you thought you knew gets reorganized.
Chapter 16 is one of those.
Hasan-i-Sabah returns to Alamut to find his mother and the Drigu waiting for him — and they’ve got something to say before they leave this plane of existence. What they reveal in that smoke-filled room is the thing the entire story has been quietly building toward: that Hasan didn’t find the Drigu by accident. The Drigu didn’t survive that caravan massacre by luck. None of it was random. And the knowledge that gets passed to Hasan in this chapter — through breath, through hashish, through a blurring of all the lines between self and everything — is the seed of something that won’t fully flower for several more chapters but which you can feel forming the instant it’s handed over.
“Build your stronghold in the Valley of Baboob,” the Drigu tells him. “Reveal Baoism, as you must.”
There it is. Right there.
If you’ve been reading along on Royal Road— which, if you haven’t, is a genuinely cool old-school platform for readers and writers where the whole novel is free to read and follow — you’ll know that Baoism doesn’t just show up fully formed. It’s been bleeding into the story from the very beginning. The Drigu’s teaching — “Reality is unknowable and nothing is absolute” — is the philosophical spine of everything I’ve been writing under the Baoism banner. What’s happening in this chapter is the moment of inheritance. Hasan receives the full weight of it - just like I did.
The connections are real. What you’re reading in *Hasan i-Sabah* is the same current that flows through Baoism.org, through the Sultanate of Baboob in *The Nuns of Baboob* (launching April 16 on Royal Road and available now on Amazon.), through the wandering philosophical consciousness you might recognize from *Notes from Nowhere*. Same ideas, different incarnations. That’s the thing about a teaching that comes through breath — it keeps finding new lungs.
The audio version of this chapter is me reading it. Just my voice, the words I wrote, the story I’ve been living inside for a long time. That feels like it means something to me, and I hope it does to you too.
This recording is available to paid subscribers of here because your support is what makes it possible for me to keep writing these things - and I want to connect to you with voice and breath. I don’t take that lightly.
The full novel is on Amazon if you want to hold it: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CTDP5KFW
The free version — every chapter, new ones dropping every two days — is on Royal Road. Go follow it there. It’s the kind of platform that deserves more traffic from readers who actually care about books.
Hit play. The Drigu has something to tell you.
