YD6-80(DECROLY): Aetheria's Reins on a KNU 778 Bridal Steel, historic Romantic Chimay

 

Chapter Synopsis: Step into a world where blueprints pulse with memory and machines whisper in omens. A silver Audi bears a number not yet understood. A Russian woman sketches fate with colored pencils. And the professions echo present gestures. Follow the narrator through shifting roles, rituals of acquisition, and a ride toward prophecy—where architecture, desire, and myth converge in unexpected lines.

BOOK SYNOPSIS: Aetheria, in the zodiacal forest—where birds sing and leaves flutter like wings bathing in light. The symphony of the forest comes to mind. This is the cosmos’ whisper through our creatures, and in these pages, she leads me. These chapters unfold as a clarifying companion to my earlier book, The Code: Horizon of Infinity—a philosophical memoir exploring how the universe sculpted our minds. Through Aetheria, the lens of consciousness who begins to reveal herself, her presence lives in the rhythm. She seeks form—moving toward the name she will one day claim: Sunshine.

YD6-80(DECROLY): Aetheria's Reins: KNU 778 and the Historic Road to Chimay

When I stepped through the last door of the repurposed apartment—onto two trailing blueprint tables where a double bed might have furnished the room—I crossed into another dimension of construction—alterations and houses. Introduced by the man in a wheelchair to the petite Russian woman, seated at a makeup vanity—a husband who reckoned I could better serve his wife. 

Inside the office of the chartered quantity surveyor, Forum. Turning his wheelchair with the strokes of angry hands, he spins around—flaring—and leaves me with a ball of nerves—delivered. 

In a flare of fire, she sprints from the blueprint. Her mind sucks the oxygen from the room. With a box of fine, needle-sharp colored pencils, she shows me to a blueprint spread across a table. She spares me her precious minutes. away from her blueprint instructing me. “Coche le plan, rédige une description—Tick the blueprint. . .” handing me an accountant fullscape block, in itself, says, Script a description, noting the measurement on the takeoff page—and be thankful. She turns back to her vanity table. I settle on a chair diagonally across from a hunched man, deep into his own takeoff. 

As I’m seated alongside a wall-to-wall window, flickers in the corner of my eye, across the void of the street to the hedgerow of jagged terracotta rooftops, sundials of shadows rotate around chimneys to brick gables. There for me to notice, though half-removed in the hush of the office. Aetheria, at watch—tethered to her destiny through the day.

I return a few days later—not to the bones etched in the blueprint, but to the landscape itself. And unlike an apprentice shipped off to the bench of the Pretoria Technical College every Thursday—mechanical drafting, bricklaying vocabulary—I failed to recall much. 

After work, I stroll through a bookstore. To my surprise—the hand of a ghost. Then I must smuggle it in the office, and behind the little woman—sharp as a surgical scalpel. In stealth, glimpse at the pages of a pocketbook: The Handbook of Mathematical Formulae. To my delight: arcs and spheres at a glance. Curbs bend, sidewalks stretch paving, asphalt weaving lanes around curves into parking—adding it all up on the takeoff sheets.

I return—my mind bushwhacking through a forest of concrete columns. Each day starts fresh, then lead on, cross-eyed with fatigue—the guts weighed down. The shell of a garage—vehicular concrete ramps up and down along each other—refracts a kaleidoscopic mirror, scissoring within and between decks, disjointed. There—my mind loses grip, imprisoned within an aerated concrete lattice of staggering levels. 

And then, the petite Russian woman approaches. A thought sparks–leads me away, before she finds her words and says, “Vient—Come!” My eyes shoot away from the blueprint, swarming with colored wings—tick-offs. Next door, to an island of four tables, she spins around and vanishes behind me. Instead, the man in his wheelchair, dwarfing me–raises a plastic charm and wheels through the gaping double-doorway, saying “Les ingenirurs–The engineers’ office.” 

I’m totally blind—as I’m taken up with the shift of my perspective: ‘Is this a promotion?’ I ask in silence. He leads me to an imposing ream—a bill of quantities—Aetheria is orchestrating these circumstances. In the light of the window. ‘That’s no small building.’ I’m left to reflect, sparse on words. He spins away in his wheelchair, I settle on the swivel chair, and I'm hit by the oneiric first words I read—‘French.’ Another gate. A silent wall, rising.

I lift my eye to three men, seated behind the surrounding tables, their gaze fixed on me, Hynas’ mocking, bar one. I’m thinking: ‘I’ll need help with my French.’ The weight of the ream presses down. Blind to the tower, yet rifling through its pages—expected to undertake interim valuations of work completed on-site, verify quantities against the Bill of Quantities, prepare recommendations for payment certifications.

At the same time, that Friday, I beg, Mr. Favi in his wheelchair. “Puis-je quitter plus tôt–May I leave early?” My mind needs to breathe—through the tangles of the past week, challenging the one to come.

As an independent contractor, later in the day, I step down to the lobby and out to the street, fetching the car from the curb. Behind the lightning-tagged Opel steering wheel, my hands spin, driving into the lane of traffic—its sonic mirage hints at Aetheria. Angelic fingers stroking her cosmic harp—enveloping my head as quatro-speakers dissolve, and the car returning itself to the hire agency. 

I walk out the yard gate after entry and leave the car behind, weaving along sidewalks, until the hedgerows of fenestrated brick facades give way to prow-berthed curtain walls. Where, the sluice opens and tailgates of commercial vans rest in a row—oneiric, to the muzzles, muscles encircling the six-cylinder Audi. 

My heart aches—for the purr, the throttle traction—a visceral echo of South Africa, my Mercedes 280SE, and Aetheria’s silage. A relationship lingers in the cars I drive, radix-alizing–the palm Aetheria impressed upon the machine I possess. 

Saying to myself: 'Make do!' I cross the bridge into the showroom. The silver-gray Audi’s spot is vacant, a good omen. I reason with myself: ‘that’s logic.’ From the showroom platform, the young salesman descends the stairs. He leads me alongside the stage, where the finance application ritual had taken place a week earlier, and introduces me to a fatherly barman.

In an unexpectedly ceremonious gesture, the barman asks. “Puis-je vous offrir un café—may I offer you a coffee?” 

The salesman’s gaze flicks sideways, overlapping his ritual sacrifices, astronomical alignment, sacred machinery—behind the twin doors set into the flank. “Les mécaniciens sont encore occupés—The mechanics are still busy affixing the registration plates,” he says. 

Confident all my needs are fulfilled, he leaves, as I yield to the barman. “Oui—yes, thanks.” 

I shift to one of the three bar stools at the counter, blurting. “Vous êtes ici à plein temps—Are you here full time?” 

Impressed, not only by the niched coffee bar, but the grandfather—free with his words, as I am. Unoffended, he replies like a businessman: “Oui. Je dois gérer le stock et servir les gens qui travaillent à l'étage—Yes. I’ve got to keep stock and serve the people working upstairs.”

Chatty—until he breaks off, his eyes shifting—fatherly, as if ready to give away his daughter in marriage—saying in the hush of his mind: 'There you are.'

Besides me, a workshop door swings open into half-gapping garage light—a fortyish man in a surgically clean, yet mechanic’s outfit. The barman’s glance—an invitation—speaks: 'Here is your customer.'

Upon exchanging glances, with a best man's poise, the mechanic says. “La voiture est prête—The car is ready.” Through a graceful turn away, he calls me to a gallant exchange of keys. I follow. In the background, the Audi’s silver-sky wedding gown drapes over the fenders, clearing the wheels along the workshop curb. I catch the man distancing from the rear fender taillight, leaving me with that sinking feeling—left in the lurch by a best man–who vanishes before the vows–I turn by the “Audi A4” tag in slow motion.

I extend a chevalier’s fingers—‘May I have the first dance?’—pulling the door’s grip. I step around the wing of a swinging door, lower onto the seat, and grip the steering wheel–a stunt that didn’t bruise my ego–it is not a second hand acquisition. The salesman reassured me: “Modèle de l’année dernière. Une voiture de direction—Last year’s model. A company executive’s car…” That rhymes with economics. 

The dashboard reads—twelve thousand kilometers on the odometer. I tweak the key, awakening an instrumental panel—the engine’s hearty purr. I palm the gearshift knob, foot the clutch pedal, shift into gears, and coast away, finding my bearing. 

Alongside gleams a surgery for cars, and I sink into the crotch of the seat, the driveway prolonging the creamy-white periphery of the shed’s industrial cladding—drawn toward believing in a distant hangar crack, where a glow wiggles, flagging my way out. I veer through the first of a two-way lane. A boom lifts at my approach. Before I veer into the street, the hedgerow of glaring windows, waver and flickers—flags fluttering as I set off on a maiden ride. Weaving through streets toward confidence, my mind alerts: ’A quarter full,’ spared from an imminent reserve. I pull up at a filling station. 

Reminiscent of standing by while petrol boys pumped gas into my Mercedes 280SE—back then, I was dating Jacqueline. Her German mother’s wit had voiced the code, FRL 060 T—rhyming Fräulein off, when driving through the Transvaal Province, gas stations filled her up, en route back and forth from home, then, in Sandton. 

With Aetheria already flushing out the number plate KNU 778, nurturing to mind, rhyming De_P’pa, father in childhood saying: “Knull” in Flemish—”Dude.” is that the cosmic title I’m owning with this the Audi, and furthermore read it like a DOS command-line: the seven shadowing the seven, and the eight standing out by a single notch. The number plate only rhymes, to discover the coded message, to mind, as I'm driving and pull up after a pattering of the cobblestone street, lock up, to walk the Fox’s path for the evening at the gingerbread cottage. 

A pepish figure wavers in the mirrored depth of the front yard—cast from the distant hedgerow of townhouses, their top-floor windows overlooking the enclave’s yard wall. Behind those fenestrated rear facades, spectators linger—eyes shaded beneath saddled tiled roofs, gables, and chimneys rising against the azure sky. Then, from the gaping hollow of the kitchen: Victoria emerges with a swing of one of the twin door leaves–pepish into sunlight—fluttering two pairs of dress pants in her hands.  

Victoria passes by Jephte, poised, circling the terrace table to the other head—facing her brother, turning her back, with lingering eyes, as I’m at an angle in the gaping entrance door on the doorstep of the gingerbread house. 

‘Ow! What are you up to?’ jolts to mind.

I grew up with two elder sisters. Ilona used to smirk, eyes tightening, holding mischief bound to surge—that same glint lingers, speaks now in Victoria’s gaze. ‘Look what I’m going to do, to those pants of yours.’ 

In an elaborate ritual, Victoria lays the pants onto the glass top—see-through to the wrought-iron undercarriage—before the terrace paved tiles, spread under Jephte’s spinster regard. In the hush of his cool posture, his oversight is precise, fixed on his sister's dancing hands. A ruminating jealousy flickers—yet he dares not contradict his baby sister, watching her pile the pants on the glass top. 

With both my arms over Victoria’s shoulders, I tug at one pair of pants—but the fabric’s entangled. She wiggles, fierce and defiant, though mindful not to snap a bone. I daren’t force my weight onto her petite figure. I pause—half-lamenting, yet not abandoning the occasions for a grab. Beneath my arms, she turns solemn—one hand smoothing a pant leg in suspense across the see-through tabletop glass, the other wielding a pair of large tailor’s shears, rings snug around her left fingers. I press forward to retrieve my pants, but she braces, resisting with her shoulders, thwarting me. Then she rolls her hips around the table corner, the shears in her right hand—standing firm at the cuff of my sleek-fit pants.

‘She’s serious?’ crosses my mind—as I exclaim, “What are you doing?” But my ego rises, anticipating the siblings’ mockery if I reveal my love for these pants. It touches my virility—the grace of feeling light, sculpted—a bullfighter in fitted trousers, poised in a dance arena. Then it glitches—I’m swept into the swirl of a Flamenco dress, carried by its flares, dancing a Tango. I rise from the absurd edge of music to grasp myself again, shy behind my ego—the kind siblings seized without mercy. Victoria’s eyes, fierce and fixed on my pants, delivering her blows. “Je déteste ce pantalon—I hate these pants.”

I jolt with her defensive shoulders while, in a ritual, her hand sleeks my pants—wielding shears, her thumb awkwardly adrift in a finger-ring too large. Her fingers clasp, but the blades tilt, pinching the fabric. Gradually, cuts multiply along the cuff, biting deeper. She begins to master the snipping advance up the pant leg. I stop dancing around her shoulders and cry out for my beloved pants. I retreat toward the entrance door, with anger mounting, as she shreds them to ribbons. Then, she frolics back into the kitchen’s somber interior and drops the pants into the trash. 

Victoria’s shadow comes around, flitting past the dining room fenestrated facade–pepsish steps out the gaping entrance door, leaving Jephte behind, calling. “Daddy, vient, on y va—come, let’s go.” Phlegmatic, she trawls the fury from my body’s grip. Pepish in her gait, she crosses the terrace toward the arched gateway breaching the green hedge to the fox’s path. She pulls the door open—slats scraping—and steps through with a swirl. Facing me, I catch up as she says. “J’ai envie d’aller à Chimay—I feel like going to Chimay.” 

She clears from the Fox Hole Path, stepping onto the cobblestone street. Approaching the Audi in row facing the warped security fence, that screens the property’s green to a block of staggering apartments. She pauses by the Audi’s taillight. In a hush her gaze sweeping across the silver-gray undulations, before stepping on amid the parked cars. As I unlock the door, I ask. “Ma Petite, et ta voiture—what about your car?”

Nonchalant, she shrugs, “Je viendrai chercher ma voiture plus tard—I’ll come and fetch my car later.” 

I blurt: ‘Je vais devoir te conduire à travers la ville—My Little One! I’ll have to drive you across the city?’

I slip into the seat, roll over my hip to reach across the console–hooking a finger to the door latch. As I straighten, the door swings clear. Victoria lowers herself into the passenger seat, pulling it close behind her. I tweak the ignition key, to an engine purr.

“Ma Petite. . .” I say, thinking, ‘I don’t know where you're leading us to. Sure you do.’ Victoria’s voice, a tide, she says: “Thérésa Cabarrus.” Said with such finality, it leaves me baffled.

Our glass bubble eases back from the warped mesh fence guarding an open terrain. We reverse into the street, then I shift into forward gear. Wheels coast toward our earlier egress—the gaping interstice where the Fox Hole path opens—tires patter across the cobblestone.

“Thérésa Cabarrus. . . est devenue la coqueluche de la Révolution—Thérésa Cabarrus became darling of the French Revolution,” Victoria says, unveiling an historic rhythm, her voice breathing a story from the heart into the open. “Elle était séduite par le charm—She was seduced by the charms of a Tonton. . .” With a glance, she positions herself within the circumstances, saying. “Elle a perdu sa virginite”—losing her virginity at twelve. Passing from Spain to Bordeaux. In Paris she meets a former ambassador—the painter Rubens.” 

I blink. “Rubens?”

Victoria adds, “Elle se marie a quatorze an—She marries at fourteen to a Marquis, a dandy, where the games of love are not of the hazard.”

Outside my side window slips past a wild green leaf hedge. Over my shoulder, the last of the rural architecture—mansions lurking in the upcoming corner, half-shy in the woods. Deep-set hip-roofs and valleyed terracotta tiles peek through the foliage. The pattering tires fall to a hush, rounding into a hedgerow of fenestrated facades, meeting the stretch of open asphalt. 

Across the street—when Victoria's profile aligns in her window—my gaze slips past her, drawn to the backdrop: the entrance of plate-glass doors and sidelights, half-shrouded by the shadows of curb-parked cars reflecting the street. I’m stirred by a grip of shadowed memory–recalling the evening I reversed up this one-way street, a short cut from to avoid circling the entire block. 

That evening, I thought: ‘If I am backing up in a one-way. . . I’m not driving forward.’ But a police officer leapt out the entrance, halted me mid-reverse, and chased me down—forcing me to track forward, drive the full loop, and park wherever I could. Before disappearing into the Fox Hole on my way to Jephte’s gingerbread house for the night.

The police quarters ghost the hedgerowed mansions across the way, mirrored faintly in the glazing—populating a stark architecture of staggered balconies, exposed concrete lines, and dressed brick. The hedgerow of modernity slips away down the street in search of sunlight. 

Victoria weaves us away from the relaying Town Hall of Uccle, threading through a string of classic townhouses—each one louder than the last, as if crying out, ‘Can you refresh me. . . with modern amenities?’ My own dream echoes in our glass bubble: to renovate these houses. But Victoria’s dream is louder. “Le rêve de mon enfance—My childhood’s dream,” she says, “is to ride in a horse-drawn coach from Spain.” 

But with us—unrestrained by the glazing, on our lap, peaceful in her mirage—Aetheria speaks: ‘It is who’s pulling the reins. Can you see that?’ Intuitively, we are together—en route, by a farce insistence, inside the Audi A4, metallic sky-silver, code-named: KNU 778.’

As our worlds enshroud in a glass bubble, with Victoria navigating and me steering into outbound arteries, the road widens through glass-box retail colonies until we merge onto the leading highway—trickling with Saturday traffic. Above the listing of Walloon towns, one word flashes: “Paris.” 

As the asphalt bands cut incessantly through the sunbathing countryside. The white-stippled lane line flits beneath the fender toward the tire by my side—‘Catch me if you can?’ Ahead of Victoria, the woods rise from the distant earth, monstrous bystanders blurring at the shoulder before streaking into smudges in an accelerating retreat. The flocculent canopies exhaust themselves, falling away to the open fields—and farther still, the horizon tilts afield in planetary deceleration, beside Victoria’s framed window. 

She's foolish, maybe—but her dream beneath French skies feels real. It takes my breath away. I brace against the sudden tug of a vision; a six-white-horse carriage, its bridle flashing in the sun–blind to its snail’s pace. She sets off on some impossible arc: Aachen, a German border town—a stopover—before crossing east. Her destination: Russia.

Out there, at the edge of the rotating horizon, she moves across barely measurable. Meanwhile, in our glass bubble, we continue, realistically, to pursue a way toward Paris.

“Thérésa Cabarrus, elle rencontre. . .” Victoria resumes. “Elle rencontre–She meets a printer, a gentleman. She’s there with the fall of Louis XVI from his throne. . . at the assault on the Tuileries. And he’s guillotined. She takes advantage of new legislation to divorce her first husband and joins her lover.” 

Paris flashes past as Victoria’s gaze tenses—she catches the road sign and holds her finger toward the lane split. Our glass-bubble descends the off-ramp, taking the relay. 

“They imprisoned her—not for long. Freed after Robespierre was beheaded. Nothing in common with her lover; she marries another shadow behind the regime. Her husband rode with Napoleon’s armies. She promoted the new divorce rights.” That Leo in her Moon is already blooming, in symbiosis with the Snake in her year. This character can move—filling your whole body with its charisma—but is much in need of wealth.  

I veer away from the shadow cast by the ongoing overpass, heading forth on a country road. Victoria says, “Fatiguer—Tired of her frivolous past, she met her prince, the future heir to Chimay.”

Before the village, we pull over, before a bottle of beer looms as big as a house, in all appearance, in the hush of the outskirts. The tires grind the gritty aprons to a halt before the shell of a restaurant that leaves a doubt derelict–’maybe not?’ We step out, Victoria leads us across the country road, the castle rising before us–her gaze. She aches for the romantic ages. In her words, she sees Thérésa Cabarrus walking across the moat’s drawbridge, her daughter at her side—still a child approaching the castle.

Victoria’s words drift in the air as our footsteps crunch across the gritty apron toward the castle. Her wish floats out of her—she finds the door, while my mind struggles to absorb the weathered stone masonry, a wing that dwarfed the stone workers into the medieval.

A fifty-fiveish woman, fresh as the current age, welcomes us behind the crack of a wooden door. We step inside and she continues where victoria left off–circling a dance hall, its raw timber bulks leaves the bind  upstairs floor to imagine the floorboards. She stands in the hush, of the only living creature, poised beside a counter populated with pamphlets and mugs. But as the woman explains, Victoria's gaze flits toward the gaping doorway, blind to her host gently pushing the usual modern rigmarole meant to sustain the heritage.

Both women step off into the gaping corridor, and I trail—still oriented from my external vantage, tracing the imprint of the castle’s medieval wing. It follows a tale of inspiring stonemasons, yet what unfolds is phantom memory: men chiseling into bedrock a narrow tube, a shoulder-wide staircase spiraling upward. I overhear the host say: “Les escalier–The steeply rising stairs hinders any mounting invader, forcing those who wield swords into disadvantage—unable to master the descent in the chaos of a fight.” 

The great-great-granddaughter steps aside the stage, to Victoria’s delight, into the château’s intimate theater—renovated by the de Riquet family with thick curtains and padded seating—conjuring visions of private performances. Costumed nobility lurking in candlelit shadows, music drifting between velvet folds, Italianate opera excerpts where Thérésa herself might have sung or directed spirited amateur scenes. Symbolic stagings evoking ancient Greece or Roman myths, echoing her image as Notre-Dame de Thermidor. As the women talk, I realize—through the ages, little has changed. Only morphed. The stage became a cinema, then a television screen. . . then silence. We turn away, returning to the entrance hall. 

Our personal guide leans an elbow on a modern counter niched in a corner of scattered castle’s memorable. I couldn’t spoil my reveries with cheap souvenirs. But Victoria, too, had stepped away—uncharacteristically. Though she is not to offend a host. I don’t notice the sign until I’m outside crunching the gritty apron, and the great-great-granddaughter closed the heavy, and horse-broad heavy wooden door behind us. 

The winged chapel lies open derelict-like. Though we had peeked earlier inside—a few candle flames, still trembling, before a private passage from the interior.

Off across the road, pitched-roof shelter gathered in a quiet cluster, a strip mall debut. Victoria strolls toward a shuttered restaurant. As I’m heading for the driver’s door, she lingers near the Audi, her outline curved by the rear fender, then steps in. I tweak the ignition. As she’s overwhelmed silent, I drive off, pulling out the empty apron to the asphalt. Her hazy gaze leads me on—a short loop toward the abbey, where Flanders monks once brewed under the seigniors of Chimay.

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1. You are welcome to read all the chapters and explore more at my website: How the Universe Sculptured Our Mind. I spend an absurd amount of time chasing expression—perhaps to shame. But the challenge is mine, updates may occur without notice, shaping the timeline, perceptions. The gift is yours: thoughts, echoes, reflections. I take them with gratitude. And you—who are you, reading these lines, stepping into my genre, my style, the quiet current of my subject?

2. https://sites.google.com/i-write4u2read.com/howtheuniversesculpturedourmin?usp=sharing