So I thought I'd lay out Sonata's plans and see who I can get involved in this (actually, with the various monkey's in her head and the former Wolf Priest, I think I've got everyone but Matt and Jenn already participating in Sonata's little quest, but I want to give a head's up on where I am planning on pushing it, so people know what to help me play off of).

Sonata is going to drive herself into a twilight (a bought of wizard madness brought on by direct exposure to too much magical power). She is trying to time things just right, so that she can combine the maximal amount of learning monkey magic from the voices in her head, learning to kill monkeys from the ex-Wolf, and walking backwards through the nine days of seven islands and a city, so that she can peak everything on the day of ascension and use the endless fall into water at the end of the cycle to destroy her monkey possession.

I expect it will go horribly wrong, but that is what she is trying to do.

Here is the basic imagery from the text, matched up with the next nine days:

Yesterday, the 12th was:
The man in white stands at the end of the World
The Red Sun sets in the Cerulean Sea.
All the world, past and future, lies before his feet.
Nine Steps to a Home he will never see.

Within the religious metaphor, this is the day on which the Priest King of Vestra returns to the world after learning all there is to know of the future and the past, and of the reason and meaning of each thing, and realizes that he has no place in the world. Standing at the end of a peninsula that will 80 years later be a chain of islands, he turns and walks towards home.

Not nearly so grand or extreme, the Wolf Priest abandoning his role and walking away fits this beautifully for me.

This night is Step over water.

The 13th is Three Angels of Creation bury a Fallen Star.

As the Priest King walks, he makes his way back through the calendaric cycle reviewing or perhaps abandoning all that he has experienced and learned over the magical year.

This first step takes him to the cusp of union and wisdom, the moment when he gained the transcendent knowledge.

That night is the Step over heather.
The fourteenth is Five Maidens bathe an Infant Son.

The second step takes him to the cusp of mercy and communion, the moment in which he truly abandoned his vast theocratic power to become a mere human.

That night is Step over stone.
The fifteenth is Seven Brigands in Blue murder a lamb.

The third step takes him to the Day of Passion, when he slaughtered those who begged his mercy for rejecting the teaching of Love and Reason, betraying those teachings himself.

That night is Step over the sea.
The sixteenth is Golden Banners of three cities flutter above a battlefield.

The forth step takes him to the cusp of tension-strife, when he raised up his armies to wage war on those who rejected Love and Reason.

Then Step over the rain.
The seventeenth is Two brothers, Red and Blue, face the Rising and Setting sun.

The next step brings him past mid-summer's day, to the cusp of fidelity-constancy, in which his respect and admiration for the teachings of Love and Reason hardens into law.

Step over the wind.
The eighteenth is The Queen of the Sea stands, a Purple Serpent kneels.

The next step takes him to the Day of Knowledge, on which the teachings of Love and Reason are fully revealed to him, and he first rejects his Theocratic ways.

Step over light.
The nineteenth is The Yellow Knight, bound in chains.

The next step takes him to the cusp of adversity-sacrifice, when he sent soldiers to capture Love and Reason, and they chose to accompany the soldiers.

Step over the threshold.
The twentieth is Josephine and Constancy look up from cups of Melos.

The next step takes him to isolation-justice, when Love and Reason first enter the world (also, this is the period where the Priest King is very lonely, and lies by a lake in the mountains, and eventually gives birth to a daughter from out of his head, Isdanor, whose son, Iam will bring about the war that ends Chalycidicean neutrality, which brings down a vast curse upon the peninsula, leaving only a chain of islands. This is the peninsula that the Priest King is walking back across, taking care to step only on the islands, and that with this step he has stepped off of, into a city that doesn't yet exist when he is walking, but in which Nil and Gi met with Regina Maris, the Queen of the Sea, 425 years later).

Finally, there is the night of the Twentieth, Step into Darkness.
The Shining Waterfall, unseen but remembered.

This is the Day of Dissipation, when the Priest King vanishes softly and silently away, the beginning of the world and the end of the old world, it is also the day before Isolation, when the world is not yet made.

Looking at that, I think that Sonata may only be staying in the Woods for part of the cycle (through the sixteenth or the seventeenth), particularly since she does understand the connection between Regina Maris, Lyridice, and Gi and Nil. Also, it might be nice from a player perspective if she were able to entangle more of the mages in her messiness. But maybe she will stay out there in the woods the entire time, could go either way.

Anyway, I know this is in the pretentious as hell category, but I think there is some neat stuff possible within this, so if anyone else feels like playing in this imagery, I would be very happy.