The thirteenth bottle is the last wine. It’s the culmination of a whole eschatology of wine. It’s the wine all the others have been leading up to. That will make all of them make sense.
We’ve been ascending a wine ladder, don’t you see?
Or descending it. We’ve been going down, down, down a spiral staircase.
There’s been a method – of sorts.
A method in our drinking?
We always wanted to believe Cicero was wise. For her to know what she was doing. To sheer our fragile craft. To send us in the right direction.
And it turns out she was guiding us all along.
She’s rewarding us for our years in the part-time wilderness. To show us the meek really do inherit the earth. That the stupid are the greatest geniuses. That the great inversion could be inverted in turn.
Through making us drink bad wine?
Was the thirteenth bottle Cicero’s plan?
Everything was Cicero’s plan.
The thirteenth bottle wasn’t in Cicero’s rack. There was an empty space where it belonged. We were led to it.
Thirteen bottles is the end of the course of anti-poison.
Do you think?
It’s a cure. A cure in doses.
The thirteenth bottle turns lies into truth.
Is that right?
It’s the messianic wine.
So the thirteenth bottle stands in for all the poison in the world. it’s symbolic.
The thirteenth bottle. It’ll be your test. You’ll become Neelkanth, the blue-throated one.
And then what?
I don’t know. Get superpowers. Head out onto the astral plane and defeat the Bug in solitary combat.
So I’ll suck all the evil out of the world? What’ll happen then? Will the word be saved? Will the world end?
Work in Progress 