Cornelius Balt was a Traditions mage who engaged in secret correspondence with Xadreque Machado for over four years. Balt, probably a member of the Sons of Ether, drew the attention of the Technocracy, and Machado, due to his experiments involving time travel and travel through the Umbra. The exact nature of these experiments are never clear. He and Machado agreed that they could reveal enormous amounts of magical knowledge to Sleepers in the guise of a series of novels, though they seem to have never reached the point of actually producing a manuscript.