Hasan-i-Sabah lived to one hundred and eight years old.
Except he didn’t. You’ll have to listen to find out what he pulled. The world was fooled. Historians were fooled. I find this sort of institutional confusion deeply entertaining.
Chapter 20 is the hinge. It’s the chapter where Hasan stops being the Old Man of the Mountain in practice and becomes something else entirely. Ali, sequestered in the library he always preferred to the world anyway, turns out to be something else.
If you’ve read *The Nuns of Baboob*, you know what I’m talking about. The title sticks for a very long time — every Sultan of Baboob from this point forward carries it.
This chapter is a short one, which is part of why it hits hard. It’s the chapter where the book quietly says: the story you’ve been reading all along is not the story the history books told or even the story you thought you were getting.
The *The Nuns of Baboob* descends directly from this moment. The Baoism practiced as a state religion in that book — nine hundred years of it — starts right here, with a man traveling incognito through North Africa cracking jokes about the number of M’s in his alias.
Read it for free on https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/159403/hasan-i-sabah-how-the-worlds-most-successful-mystic — where good stories still live outside the algorithm.
Buy the whole thing on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CTDP5KFW
This audio is me reading my own work — the author, not a voice actor, not a narrator-for-hire. I think that matters. It changes what you hear. Press play and see if you agree.
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