5.20: Who is that at the den?

And that, gentle reader, is the end of the story of The Order of the Sponge. Can it really be that there is such an organisation, committed to neatness and order and comprising a brave set of peripatetic ‘pilgrims of dust’ wandering the Earth’s dirtier byways? 

And that it can be summoned by forlornly attempting to singe a sacred garment with a hot iron, as though committing a blasphemy against the Order’s basic tenets, on any of the various possible feast days of its saintly founder, including the Greek reckoning? 

Wise Hipparchus seems to think so. 

But then again, he only ever described his information as a ‘story’. And he remains a strangely secretive cove, whose background we still do not know, so he is unlikely to reveal any more.

Although they plan sometimes still to wear the insignia of the order they may have almost accidentally joined through the ritual – which did work, after all – pTravis and the others have put them back, for now, into the casket in their hidden den in the woods and are even now returning the stream to its safer course. The bulb spider threat level has returned to its lowest value.

Everything has returned to peace and calm and, I think, we can now leave them be.

But – soft! – who is that, in the den, when the others are supposed to be washing up? Isn’t that a familiar hat? It cannot be, can it? 

But, if so, what is the insignia, or ‘insigne’ as Hipparchus might insist, it now bears? And what does it mean?

And is he planning to put up two new posters in what is not, strictly, his den?

We may never know unless our storyteller can be persuaded to recount The Subtle Intents of the Disorder of Catastrophe. 

The number of fee-paying patron-level readers may have some influence on whether this comes to pass.