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Here lies the reader who will never open this book. He is here forever dead.
Among the five hundred copies of the first dictionary, Daubmannus printed one with a
poisoned dye. This poisoned copy, with its gilded lock, had a companion copy with a silver
lock. In 1692 the Inquisition destroyed all copies of the Daubmannus edition, and the only
ones to remain in circulation were the poisoned copy of the book, which had escaped the
censors' notice, and the auxiliary copy, with its silver lock, which accompanied it.
Insubordinates and infidels who ventured to read the proscribed dictionary risked the threat
of death. Whoever opened the book soon grew numb, stuck on his own heart as on a pin.
Indeed, the reader would die on the ninth page at the words Verbum caro factum est ("The
Word became flesh"). If read simultaneously with the poisoned copy, the auxiliary copy
enabled one to know exactly when death would strike. Found in the auxiliary copy was the
note: "When you awake and suffer no pain, know that you are no longer among the living."

Атех
Her name is taken to be the term for the Khazars' four states of consciousness. At night she
wore a single letter on each eyelid, inscribed as are those put on the eyelids of horses
before a race. The letters came from the proscribed Khazar alphabet, in which each letter
kills as soon as it is read. They were written by blind men, and the ladies-in-waiting shut their
eyes when they attended to the princess in the morning, before her bath. Thus, she was
protected from her enemies while she slept. This, for the Khazars, was the time when a
person is the most vulnerable. Ateh was a beautiful and pious woman, and the letters suited
her perfectly. Seven kinds of salt stood on her table at all times, and she would always dip
her fingers in a different salt before taking each piece of fish. This is the way she prayed.
They say she had seven faces, like her seven salts.
It is known that Princess Ateh never managed to die
One day, hoping to amuse her, the princess's servants brought her two mirrors. They were
much like other Khazar mirrors. Both were made of shiny salt, but one was fast and the other
slow. Whatever the fast mirror picked up, reflecting the world like an advance on the future,
the slow mirror returned, settling the debt of the former, because it was as slow in relation to
the present as the other was fast. When they brought the mirrors to Princess Ateh, she was
still in bed and the letters had not yet been washed off her eyelids. She saw herself in the
mirrors with closed lids and died instantly. She vanished between two blinks of the eye, or
better said, for the first time she read the lethal letters on her eyelids, because she had
blinked the moment before and the moment after, and the mirrors had reflected it. She died,
killed simultaneously by letters from both the past and the future.

Ловці снів
DREAM HUNTERS -- a sect of Khazar priests whose protectress was
Princess Ateh. They could read other people's dreams, live and make
themselves at home in them, and through the dreams hunt the game that was
their prey -- a human, an object, or an animal. A note left by one of the oldest
dream hunters has been preserved, and it reads: "In dreams we feel like fish in
water. Occasionally we surface from a dream and skim an eye over the world
on shore, but we again descend with yearning haste, for it is only in the depths
that we feel good. During these brief sorties we notice on dry land a strange
creature, more sluggish than ourselves, accustomed to breathing in a manner
different from our own, and glued to the land with all its weight, deprived of
the passion we inhabit like our own bodies. For here below, passion and the
body are indistinguishable, they are one and the same thing. That creature out
there, that too is us, but a million years from now, and between it and us, aside
from the years, lies a terrible calamity that has befallen it, because that
creature out there has separated the body from passion..."

???
When at night we fall asleep, we all turn into actors and step each time onto a different stage
to play our part; every dream is sure to carve a letter on our flesh as no one can tear the
cloth from inside at night and have it whole again in the morning. no one can hold their
deeds from staining their eyes. And by day? By day, when we are awake, we learn our part.
Sometimes, when we do not learn it well, we dare not appear on the stage and instead hide
behind other actors, who for the moment know their lines and moves better than we do. And
you, you come to the theater to watch our performance, not to act in it. May your eye behold
me when I am well rehearsed, for no one is either wise or beautiful all seven days of the
week.