The Rectodus Society ((link)) Info

Membership was hereditary and rigorous. At age thirteen, every son of a Rectodus member was taken to the “Hall of Angles.” There, he was shown two doors. One was a straight, unadorned rectangle. The other was a perfectly circular portal. To choose the circle was to be cast out, shorn of the family name, and given a small purse of silver to begin a new, crooked life elsewhere. To choose the rectangle was to be anointed. No one had chosen the circle in over a century. The last who had, a boy named Leo Vane, was Aldous’s own younger brother. He had walked through the circle and vanished into the fog of Prague’s old town, never to be mentioned again.

They called themselves nothing at all. But if you pressed them, the old archivist, Thaddeus, would lean in and say: “We are the Society of the Second Thought. The Committee of the Gentle Bend. The Order of the Open Question.” the rectodus society

A ripple went through the assembled men. To ignore the heart was, to them, the highest compliment. Membership was hereditary and rigorous

“The founding axiom is a mis-translation,” Crispin whispered, in the clock tower’s main hall, where every chair faced due north and the chandelier hung from a single vertical chain. The other was a perfectly circular portal

Crispin turned from the bricked window. “Take the crooked path, Aldous. It’s longer. It’s harder. But at the end of it, there’s a view.”

It was a small, choked sound, like a mouse sneezing. But in the Rectodus Society, a laugh was a seismic event. It was jagged. It was asymmetrical. It was beautiful.