The Cyrenaian Hedonic Church does not possess a complete canon. It never did. What survives are fragments. Burned pages. Half-legible verses copied by exhausted hands into the margins of newer texts. Liturgies interrupted by war, flood, schism, and deliberate erasure. Whole sermons reduced to single surviving lines repeated so often they became proverb.
The faithful call these remnants The Black Leaves.
There are said to have once been nine primary volumes, though no surviving account agrees on their names or order. Some claim they were never books at all, but spoken rites carried from mouth to mouth by wandering confessors and threshold priests. Others insist the original writings were intentionally dismantled and scattered among the initiated so no authority could ever fully weaponize them.
This much is agreed upon: The writings emerged during the earliest Reckonings, in the years after the Church split from the doctrines of obedience and purification. The Cyrenaians rejected the notion that humanity became holy through suppression. They taught instead that divinity revealed itself through confrontation: with hunger, with shadow, with desire, with ruin, with the unbearable weight of being fully seen.
The surviving verses reflect this tension. They speak often of serpents, thresholds, mirrors, ash, masks, gardens, wounds, and monstrous forms of care. They treat ruin not as punishment, but as revelation; not as failure, but as architecture exposed.
Modern archivists divide the recovered material into loose collections:
The Garden Texts
The Threshold Verses
The Ash Canticles
The Book of Reckoning
Several Proverbs
Even these categories remain disputed, as The Black Leaves do not agree with their own catalogues. This is not contradiction. It is preservation.
Many verses appear in multiple collections with slight variations, suggesting centuries of oral transmission and reinterpretation. Certain fragments contradict one another directly. Some passages reference missing myths, unnamed saints, or forgotten rituals no longer understood.
Cyrenaian priests often warn novices:
Any scripture that survives intact has never been tested.
Perhaps most unsettling is the recurring figure found throughout the surviving Leaves: The Watcher at the Threshold. Sometimes serpent. Sometimes monster. Sometimes priest. Sometimes villain. Never clearly condemned. Never entirely trusted. Always guarding the passage between transformation and annihilation.
The oldest surviving commentary attached to The Black Leaves contains only this notation: Beware those who read these texts seeking comfort. They were written for those seeking recognition.
Fragments from the Black Leaves
I. On Gardens and Serpents
gardens are important;
there you will find necessary serpents.
grow things and admire them, but be wary:
they will look back at you.
when you strike the serpent, remember:
it taught you how to strike.
the serpent teaches patience better than saints.
what you bury grows teeth.
beware those who demand your softness before your trust.
they do not fear your violence.
they fear your discernment.
your softness frightened them more than your teeth.
some thresholds require teeth.
II. On Ruin
every ruin is a cathedral if you kneel long enough.
do not mistake ash for ending;
it only waits to burn again.
ruin is the most faithful companion.
nothing reveals the architecture of a soul faster than collapse.
the world will call you broken when what it really means is:
you no longer fit inside its expectations.
not every fire is destruction;
some fires are beacons.
the wise learn the difference between being consumed and being transformed.
III. On Masks and Villains
paint your villains wisely;
they’ll make you a better hero.
be a wiser villain;
the world needs better heroes.
the mask will outlive the face.
some people survive by becoming smaller.
others survive by becoming myth.
you were never meant to fit cleanly inside systems built from fear.
untempered fear mistakes itself for morality.
some monsters devour.
some monsters stand watch.
the room changes when certain people enter it.
accept what you are.
IV. On Judgment and Silence
judge yourself before you judge the world.
the wiser judge condemns themself first.
silence is the truest accomplice.
and yet silence can also be sanctuary.
learn which is which before calling either holy.
some people confuse control with safety.
they are not the same thing.
discernment is holier than obedience.
the ones who never question themselves becomes dangerous.
the ones who only question themselves becomes prey.
V. On Hunger and Thresholds
all growth is hunger in disguise.
every oath is a cage, no matter how golden.
shadows do not follow;
they wait.
the threshold is sacred because transformation always costs something.
you do not need permission to exist at full voltage.
care fiercely.
protect deliberately.
burn only what must be burned.
there are those who weaponize fear.
and there are those who walk into it carrying light.
learn the difference.
you are not obligated to abandon intensity simply because others mishandle it.
VI. Final Reckonings
constancy is the only myth.
this poem knows it is lying.
a broken mirror tells truer futures than an unbroken one.
not all monsters are hungry.
some are simply tired of kneeling.
and when they ask why you refuse to become tame,
smile like you already know something they don’t.
Final Archival Note
The Black Leaves are not intended to be completed.
They are intended to be encountered.
No reading produces final understanding.
Only further Reckoning.
The Cyrenaian Hedonic church 