"Ecstasy and existence have the same root." Michel Serres 

* 

"Seduction is the true violence." Friedrich Schiller

*

Escape strategies become hunting strategies when an animal directs the same sensitivities for spatial perception, movement, and sensory processing toward prey rather than predators.

*

Evolution doesn't favor singular greatness; it refines systems, not standalone superpowers.

“Under certain circumstances, my presence is a key. It grants access to the most exclusive spheres. I dress myself, perhaps I change my clothes—and I never lose the sense that I am shaping and sharpening my personality, which is, above all, a distinctive one. As paradoxical as it may sound: for me, this always has something to do with intelligence.” Persephone von Pechstein

An Interest in Significant Encounters

“But you will approach me differently than you first imagined. It will not be through touch, but through attention. Through your gaze, your restraint, your gestures. When you leave, you will not have conquered anything—yet nothing will be unchanged.”

Ned reads the message with a mild sense of disorientation. A contract, after all, is concluded through offer and acceptance. Persephone makes her offer. That is the agreement.

Persephone’s thoughts are clear, her reasoning precise. She wants Ned as someone who devotes himself fully to the moment, who pursues ideas with concentration and composure, who remains present rather than dissipating. She has learned—through experience she does not like to recall—that intensity collapses the moment control is lost. And how can one yield, even symbolically, to someone who no longer leads? Persephone has no interest in false restarts, awkward distancing, or the extinguishing fatigue that follows an unguarded climax of attention. She wants continuity, not collapse.

Persephone and Ned have known each other only a few weeks as colleagues on campus. In parallel, Persephone works at an AI start-up, where her superior, Marcel Grass—a loud and self-satisfied man—confuses authority with possession.

She sends Ned the location of a former church. It will be the site of their firstphysicalencounter, though physicality here is meant in the most restrained sense: proximity without intrusion. Ned replies with a thumbs-up. Persephone finds the gesture faintly irritating, but she also knows he will continue to challenge her boundaries just as she challenges his. It is a contest, and sometimes she hopes he will prevail. There is comfort in that, though she is not yet ready to admit why.

The novel begins in a small Hanseatic university town in the former GDR. In the anti-religious climate of real socialism—Religion is the opium of the people—churches were secularized. Persephone’s chosen building, once the city’s most imposing church, now serves as a rehabilitation center for troubled youths. A friend works there and has given her the key. Persephone occasionally uses the space for semi-formal improvisational theatre—ceremonial, controlled, deliberately staged.

Why not a room at the university? The old academic building, castle-like and medieval in atmosphere, would suffice. Yet Persephone wants excess—not of action, but of setting. She wants the first ritual with Ned to take place under the most dazzling circumstances imaginable.

She knows the rules. She despises them, but she knows what happens to those who violate them too openly. She has read Choderlos de Laclos carefully. Even if women like her are no longer banished to convents, an overt display of ambition can still lead to isolation, to doors quietly closing. So she plays a careful game of concealment. She chooses locations charged with meaning, with theatrical resonance—like this former church.

The Romanesque architecture is neglected but severe: rounded arches, fortress-like walls. Persephone can imagine no better setting for an initiation—or rather, its imitation. Her anticipation blurs the line between excitement and nervous vigilance.

Laclos serves her as a silent master of ceremonies, a strategist of desire and restraint. She hopes—fervently, though she would never say so—that Ned might embody, in flesh and discipline, what Laclos represents in thought.

History is full of blasphemous trials of faith, and Catholicism has always offered the richest variants. The fusion of ritual, transgression, and aesthetic excess has long exceeded mere provocation. Persephone knows this tradition well.

Ned appears behind her. She stands before a stained-glass window, backlit, motionless. Her posture is icon-like: deliberate, composed, almost ceremonial. She does not turn around. The tension is total.

Ned approaches without touching her. He respects the geometry of the space. He offers a small object—a thread, fragile and precise. Persephone responds exactly as required, completing the gesture with quiet accuracy. He leans closer and murmurs a single word of approval. It is not intimacy; it is recognition.

Still no contact.

“Your discipline is remarkable,” he says softly. “You make command seem effortless.”

Persephone shivers—not at the words themselves, but at their timing. She had been thinking of Laclos; Ned seems to echo him instinctively. He gives her space, allows her to understand the moment, to claim it fully. His mastery lies in minimalism: a breath, a pause, a fraction of movement. The effect is overwhelming without being invasive.

What follows is a carefully choreographed sequence—turns, positions, distances—executed with precision. Every action is symbolic, every movement deliberate, as if they were enacting a rite rather than an encounter.

Persephone’s restraint is genuine. She experiences the moment as heightened awareness, as a ceremony of control and anticipation. Ned quotes Peignot, Artaud, weaving theory into performance, his voice steady, almost didactic. He claims authority not through force, but through structure.

The culmination is intellectual, aesthetic, emotional. Persephone steps back, the ritual complete. The tension remains intact—contained, unresolved, alive.

As she gathers herself, her gaze catches a grimacing goblin in the corner of the stained-glass window. She smiles faintly. She knows the sign: nothing has ended.

She leaves the space composed, aware that the game has only just begun.

What will Ned’s next move be?