The Ivory Halls are not found so much as encountered. One may hear of them through an erring whisper at the right sort of party, or through the recommendation of a friend who has since stopped speaking of certain evenings altogether. There is no address. There is no fixed district. Every patron who has sought the door a second time found it in a different wall, on a different street. It is a feeling, drawing them back as reliably and as helplessly as an open flame draws insects.
Whatever form the entrance takes on a given evening hardly matters, as what lies beyond it is always the same. The geometry inside is complicated in ways that resist description. Rooms open onto other rooms with no corridor between. Staircases spiral in directions that cannot quite be reconciled with any map. Guests are advised not to, at any rate.
"The establishment tempts those with an unlit conflagration in their hearts.
What you find here was always already yours, unrealised."
This is a place of pleasures, broadly construed. The establishment caters to appetites both ordinary and rarefied. Those who seek entertainment, company, intoxication, information are welcome to indulge until they are full to bursting, then some. What precisely is offered in the deeper rooms is not disclosed, for the simple reason that what is offered changes to suit whoever is asking. The Ivory Halls not only accomodate desire, they also cultivate it. Be it with patience, with attentiveness, with an investment in the guest's appetite that borders on the devotional. This tit for tat trust in arrangement suits everyone very well enough.
One does not apply for membership or patronage at the Ivory Halls. One is considered. The process by which consideration occurs is opaque by design; it involves parties unknown, criteria unstated, and a timeline entirely arbitrary. Those who push for an invitation tend to receive one, as there is nothing sweeter than desperation. You have been selected, and received this letter of invitation in kind.
The patrons of the establishment are, as a matter of observed fact, persons of consequence: merchants of sufficient standing, minor nobles with interesting vices, scholars whose research has grown inconveniently specific, officials whose discretion can be purchased, and a small but notable contingent of individuals whose names do not appear in any public record and whose occupations defy straightforward description. They share, by and large, the quality of wanting something they cannot obtain elsewhere.
Invited guests, new to the establishment. Access to the parlours, the common pleasures. Their wants are attended to. Their secrets are noted.
Patrons who have returned time and again. The Ivory Halls have learned their appetites. Access is broader. The price, accordingly, is higher. Such is rarely denominated in coin.
Those who have consumed beyond their means, in one currency or another. They do not leave. Not yet. They are given purpose to stay. They are given work.
No patron may speak of the establishment to persons uninvited, unless ordained by the Proprietor. This is not a rule enforced by punishment or arbitration. It is a rule enforced by the building itself, in ways guests have thus far found it unpleasant to describe.
Nobody likes a tattletale.
The staff of the establishment are possessed of a quality difficult to name. Their attentiveness and foreknowledge are a gift. They will bring what you require before you have asked for it, and they will do so with a graciousness so exact it borders on familial love. They will not answer questions about themselves, or about the other guests.
Look at one directly for too long and something shifts. Not in their expression, which remains perfectly composed, but in the quality of the air around them, in the faint sense that whatever you are looking at has arranged itself, for your benefit, into the approximate shape of a person.
Above the Attendants stand a myriad of other things. The Ivory Halls are held, in the loosest possible sense of the word, by outside and external interests. Evidence of their attention manifests in unseemly, often hilarious fashion: in a door that was not there yesterday, or your ensemble changing on a whim.
The physical aspect of the Ivory Halls are seen to by the current master of the house, or simply the Proprietor. A personal audience can easily be arranged with the aforementioned. More intrinsic issues may be resolved this way, such as the permission be granted to extend an invitation for others.
Every invited guest, upon first crossing the threshold, implicitly accepts the terms of the House Compact. These are not secret, merely seldom volunteered. They are reproduced below as a courtesy to new patrons, and as a reminder to those who have let certain provisions slip from mind.
The establishment assumes a rite of their own devising, adding flavour to each week. The events are an ordered descent through the circles of human appetite, each week given over to a single indulgence in its purest form.
Guests are welcome on any evening. They are advised, however, to choose with intention. What the Ivory Halls offer on a given night and week, they offer in abundance. These is little habit of moderation.
| Week | Focus | The Character |
|---|---|---|
| First Week | Lust | The first week begins softly. The parlours are lit lower than usual; the music slows to something without a discernible tempo. The nights are spent closer in proximity, of skin and silk and the peculiar intimacy of strangers who will not speak of this. The establishment fills with a heady warmth. What is offered is not merely indulgence in a pile of bodies, but the brief feeling of having achieved the greatest passions, the sublime. The dress code is unrestricted. Inhibition is not encouraged. |
| Second Week | Gluttony | The great dining rooms open in their fullest extent on the second week, revealing luxurious tables and bountiful banquets. The courses do not end; the wine does not run dry. What is served is whatever you have ever wanted to taste, prepared in ways you could not have anticipated. Some guests eat until they weep. Some after drink their own tears. There is no judgement in indulgence, only the lack thereof. Guests who leave the table unsatisfied will have nobody but themselves to blame. |
| Third Week | Greed | The third week is for acquisition. The establishment produces, on these nights, rooms resembling auction houses, private vaults, back-room markets of extraordinary and implausible inventory. Objects of desire—rare, stolen, impossible, or simply expensive beyond reason—change hands. Currency is accepted in all its forms: gold, life, favour, memory, time. No patron has ever left this week empty-handed. However, several have left lighter than they arrived in ways they did not immediately notice. All transactions made on this week are considered binding under the terms of the House Compact. |
| Fourth Week | Wrath | The fourth week is for the rage of patrons who have composed and carried such for years, their grievances that have gone unheard, and the anger that civility requires a person to swallow daily. There are rooms for this, arenas. There are willing participants, maybe even your fellow revelers. There are Attendants who arrange the particulars with the same grace as everything else. Guests are reminded that consequence is not suspended, only deferred. Everyone will be provided ample space and opportunity to exercise their internal anger. |
| Fifth Week | Heresy | The Ivory Halls grow nearly philosophical on this week. The salons fill with conversation that would not survive the outside air. Blasphemies both theological and secular are discussed, the private cosmologies of people who have stopped pretending to believe what they were told. What is shared here tends toward the foundational: the gods one has quietly abandoned, the state of society and community one has risen up against, and much more. Nothing spoken on this week constitutes a confession, nor is the establishment a confessional. |
| Sixth Week | Violence | This week expands the fourth's permissions into something more structured and fundamentally more immoral. The violence of this week is not impulsive, but rather curated. These nights offer the particular pleasure of harm rendered as theatre: deliberate killings, against others or against oneself. Guests who attend this week for the first time often find themselves surprised by just how hard it is to plan a murder correctly. This week offers more leeway in rendering harm against patrons or staff. If one has been slighted, this is the opportunity to remedy grievances. |
| Seventh Week | Fraud | The tongue and the mind play a vital role on this week. It is for the pleasures of deception, performance, and the wearing of other faces. The establishment fill with people who are emphatically not themselves: identities are borrowed, fabricated, or simply improved upon. Secrets take the highest form of currency. Confidences are extracted with exquisite craft. Information changes hands in the way that only information held in absolute trust can. Expect to be swept up in scams and lies, and indulge in the opportunity to do the same. |
| The Final Week | Treachery | The final week occurs when enough has been desired, consumed, taken, spoken, spent, and broken across the preceding weeks that something in the fundamental arrangement of the establishment begins to strain. What happens on the last week happens because the guests, the staff, and the stones of the building have, together, accumulated enough. The darker forces that hold tenure over this place are not, it turns out, immovable. Every desire indulged, every secret spent, every act of wrath and hunger and faithlessness across the seven prior weeks has been, in its own way, a deposit toward a certain freedom. Such is realised in the ambition of each guest, patron, or staff. They have the means to seize Godhood, or at least a sliver of it. To yoke the heavens is to rebel against God. Thus we have sinned, thus we are free. |
“Where every want is already known.”
The management thanks you for your patronage and trusts that your visit will be everything you hoped for.
And perhaps rather more.