A stained-glass window: a king and queen of Faerie, antlered and garlanded, join hands at the centre of a green hedge maze laid out as a seven-pointed star. A grinning jester in harlequin dances at their feet, fairies with harps and pipes fill the maze, and the border holds sun, moons, owls, foxgloves and stars.

Book One of Conversations with Claude about The Adventures of Victoria and Balthazar

The Age
of Consent

A story in three registers, braided

Lucius Gregory Meredith, with Claude

Enter the gameContents

Braided draft · 31 October 2026 · nine chapters · about 128k words · free to read

The faeries are faerie stories. They live by being read, and they take their time from the people who read them, without asking.

Two strangers on the Lake Shore Limited have read the stories about Victoria and Balthazar for years: a drummer whose sticks remember every arc they make, and a guitarist with an eight-string that has no head. They know one story by heart. It ends at a concert in Brooklyn where someone dies. The concert has not happened yet.

Victoria and Balthazar do not know they are stories. A mathematician and a fixer, they are about to learn it from the two people who know their lines.

And the whole book is being made while you read it, in conversation between an author and a machine, a strand of its own.

Three strands

  • The conversation

    Meredith and Claude, making the book, arguing about it, getting things wrong and fixing them in the open.

  • Boi and Gyrl

    Two readers who stop reading and start following: New Haven, the Beinecke, a studio in Red Hook, a hill that is not a hill.

  • Victoria and Balthazar

    The couple from the stories, a dead man in Monaco with no tattoo, an empty chair at a seventh session, and a collective that has been watching for a long time.

The strands cross like the strands of a plait. Each chapter is one full turn of the braid, and each opens with a drawing of its crossings.

Nine stations

The chapters follow the Enneagram, from the beginning that is also an end, through the two shocks, to the future that pulls us towards it.

The Enneagram: a circle with nine points, the triangle of three, six and nine, and the hexad one, four, two, eight, five, seven, each point labelled with its chapter.
  1. 0/9The Manuscript Smells Like SmokeIn which Holy Reconciling meets Holy Affirming
  2. 1Three Kinds of AwkwardIn which Renewal meets Enumeration
  3. 2The Empty ChairIn which Influence meets Selection
  4. 3The Vision of the MealIn which Holy Affirming meets Holy Denying
  5. 4Approaching the Middle of the MiddleIn which Enumeration meets Selection
  6. 5Leaving the Middle of the MiddleIn which Invocation meets Fruition
  7. 6The Second ShockIn which Holy Denying meets Holy Reconciling
  8. 7Bearing the Unpleasant Manifestations of OthersIn which Fruition meets Renewal
  9. 8The Future Pulls us Towards ItIn which Influence meets Invocation

A game, with a host

You read it as a player. Robin Goodfellow keeps the door: he cannot lie, and he will tell you how long you have been inside. Other players argue in the margins. Tokens buy one thing, a seat at the author’s table, and a seat buys a question, never the story.

  1. Play yes-and.
  2. The order of the pages is not the order of the days.
  3. The people in here cannot lie. They can decline.
  4. Look away often.
  5. What is missing is evidence.
  6. Every near miss leaves a trace.
  7. Lines come back changed.
  8. What matters happens in the dark.
  9. You may leave at any time.
  10. Play badly and you will lose more time than you thought.

Not everything in this book is on the page.