Chapter 30 Blackburnes’ Letters #2
But I knew the truth. I had set this in motion.
I tried to stop it. I tracked the deaths, studied the patterns, but I had no proof. I was barred from the House, from Foresyth, and from you. The best I could do was keep the Book hidden. I locked it away, sealed with blood magick even the most desperate practitioner couldn’t break.
I tried to move on.
I met Estelle. A woman of light in all the ways I was dark. She loved books—the good kinds—and together, we built something beautiful. Something untouched by magick. We were blessed with a daughter, Dahlia. A flower erupting through the tainted soil of my life.
I swore to protect her. To keep her from the path that had destroyed me. When I learned you were being groomed for Foresyth, I tried to keep her away from you, from any institution that might indoctrinate her.
But even then, the Book haunted me.
It spoke to me. Whispered things I cannot bring myself to write.
The bloodlust never truly left. I told Estelle the truth, and it nearly shattered her.
We tried everything to fix me, but it was no use.
I became a ghost in my own home, watching my wife dwindle away, watching my daughter grow up afraid of the father who could never love her properly.
And now, the Book is back at Foresyth.
Renate has it. And I must stop him with what power I have left.
If you are reading this, it means that I have failed. It means that I could not protect you, and that you are in grave danger. So, I beg you, Julian, leave. Forsake the Book and walk away while you still can. Do not let it consume you as it consumed me.
I wish I could have known you, and loved you, as much as I loved your mother, Hamra. I have even come to forgive her, for the corruption she had let into her soul. I can only hope it doesn’t fully enter yours.
For my absence, for my sins, I am sorry.
Your father, Daniel Blackburne
I let the letter roll over me like a storm, its weight settling in my bones, before turning to the second—this one penned in Julian’s familiar hand.
A terrible question began to rise: had my father’s death truly been a suicide, or had he been silenced for speaking out about what was happening at Foresyth?
Anger surged in my chest, and I clung to it like a lifeline.
It was so much easier—cleaner—to feel fury than to surrender to the guilt, the shame, the grief clawing at the edges of my composure.
Easier to be furious with my father for all his secrets, with the Meister for pulling my strings like a marionette, and with Julian’s mother for dragging him, and by extension, my father, into this spiral of darkness.
Rage, at least, gave me direction. The rest only threatened to consume me.
Reading my father’s letter left me with a hollow, twisting ache, as though he’d carved something vital out of me.
My father had tried to stop the Meister.
I had blamed myself for his death, for his coldness and distance from me.
I had thought that somehow, I had failed him as a daughter—that he withdrew because I wasn’t enough, wasn’t worthy of his affection.
But now I know the truth. He didn’t send me to Sawyer Academy—not because I wasn’t good enough—but because he feared institutions and their indoctrination.
I hadn’t failed him.
He was the one who had failed me, captivated by a sea so cruel he was never able to emerge.
My whole life, I had spent hours in the bookshop with customers asking me to divine their paths, to tell them how their lives might unfold.
And now, in the presence of my own truth, my own lineage, I felt utterly unmoored, adrift in a sea I couldn’t navigate.
The binding of blood magick ran through my veins, an invisible shackle tying me to a history I had never chosen.
I wanted to deny it. I wanted to scream.
But that wouldn’t change what I had read.
I swallowed it down as I turned my attention to the next letter, penned by my brother.
Dearest sister Dahlia (if I may call you that),
Are you ready for the double death letter? No? Oh, well, I shall proceed, nonetheless.
Congratulations! You’ve discovered the dreadful powers of blood magick, imprisoning Gods, and cursed cards. You’ve made it all this way and now get to enjoy all these letters of death and madness. What a treat!
Sorry, is this too trivializing? You’ll have to forgive a dying man for making a joke or two.
But it’s only necessary for you to know the facts of our circumstances if you stand a chance of survival (two out of three are not great odds for the Blackburnes, as it stands). These precautions were necessary to guard what I’m about to share with you.
Our father was quite the man.
I received his letter a day after he died and was mortified to learn that I had a part in it (though I must admit, I had no affection for the man, having never known him).
When the Meister assigned me an additional research project, I thought he was only doing it to torment me for speaking out against him to the Council.
But no, it was part of his plan. You see, the vault in which your father left The Book of Skorn was guarded by his blood magick.
The Meister sent me to that shop of yours on Wicker Street, and I glamoured him in his office and stole the Book.
I even got to see a glimpse of you, sitting behind the bookshop counter, nose so deep in a book, I could barely see it.
I thought you were so beautiful, but now I must admit I find the thought a little uncomfortable.
Oh my Gods, sister. I had no idea what I was doing. What would happen because of my actions.
There was a passage in the Book, the real version, that states that five blood types ought to be offered—Water, fire, earth, and air. But there was another element that was elusive. That, if it wasn’t present, would make the magick unstable, and hunger for more.
Our father, just as we do, had the Bonder element in his blood but didn’t know it.
Truth-bound, he mistakenly thought he was the air elemental—how arrogant!
If only he had been there for that first ceremony with my mother all those years ago, it would have stabilized the magick, and there wouldn’t have been so many deaths to follow.
A dark twist of irony.
I’m not sure how things transpired, but at some point the practice passed hands from my mother to the current Meister you are so lovingly familiar with—Renate.
My mother gave up the practices, stricken with the guilt of the havoc she’d caused, and determined to raise me in the opposite of her image.
But Renate found her research at the same time he became the face of Foresyth.
The school was crumbling, but he was responsible for its ascension, or its demise.
He was furious at her, and they started a feud on the Council, breaking it into factions.
But despite my mother’s power, he had the longer lineage and was practicing Skorn magick.
In an attempt to restore the school, he continued the elemental ceremony but to no avail.
He didn’t know about the fifth element in our blood, but he suspected the answer was in the Book.
And he knew I’d be the only one who could retrieve it.
That day in your bookshop, when I held that Book in my hands, I knew that it was far more powerful than the Meister could even dream of.
I heard its calling—the demiurge’s bloodlust. Its desire to rid the world of its material forms in opposition to Sophia. Naturally, I became suspicious and started to investigate the Meister. I have an affliction for puzzles, as you know, but no patience for not knowing the answer to one.
I started to investigate. I hunted the Meister’s study and found his personal research journals and bloodwork analysis. He had discovered, with the help of the Book and samples of my blood, that there was a trace mineral unique to my blood that formed the Bonder.
Our father finding the Book wasn’t a pure coincidence. The Book calls to those with the Bonder’s blood. It’s the only way to stabilize its magick, to satisfy the demiurge, and theoretically, tap into Sophia’s power. It’s a precarious art.
The Book was also what led me to the Tramping Grounds—like calls to like.
I believe the Book itself was forged with the same earth as what lies there.
I used it to my advantage to conceal my messages to you, entrusting that you’d be the only one to find the Tramping Ground, as it would call to you, just as it did to me.
I realized the night of the ceremony that delivering the Book to the Meister had been delivering my own death sentence.
What he pieced together from the original Book, meant that I, along with the others, were the five sacrifices he needed to access the Shattered Mother’s powers.
I was the Bonder to bring all the other elements together.
I knew we were going to die, though the other students didn’t suspect. They hadn’t known what I did—they still thought that the ceremony killed off the weakest, just as your father had assumed. But it didn’t—it wasn’t going to.
It was going to kill me, along with the others.
Could I just leave, and never enter these haunting walls of Foresyth again?
Certainly. But that meant the other’s lives would be at risk.
And I was a bit love-sick, if I must admit.
Say hello to Aspen and Sequoia for me, would you?
They were my dearest friends, despite our disagreements.
And I knew that the Meister wouldn’t stop.
He’d find me, or worse yet, get to you before I had a chance to act.
That’s when I made the decision to end it before he did. I didn’t want to give the Meister that kind of power, or even the other students, after finding out what it did to our father. And besides, this gave me the opportunity to create the puzzle of my lifetime, my magnum opus. My final act.
Magick is all ceremonial, you see. And intention matters.
It came down to a matter of timing. If I died before the actual ceremony, then it wouldn’t work—the Meister wouldn’t succeed.
I wished I could have thought of another way, but I had mere hours to lay out my plan.
The Meister was going to kill me one way or another.
But if I was going to die, at least I’d have a say on how it would happen.
And I had a back-up plan: I had you.
The Meister knew of your existence (thanks to your prolific Tarot-reading practice which made the January issue of the Greenwich Observer).
I used that knowledge to my advantage. I knew that you’d be invited to Foresyth shortly after my death.
The Meister would draw you here with some plot of his.
And of course, you’d be curious. You’d hear the call of magick that’s in your blood, and you’d come looking for me.
I apologize, dear sister, for laying out this plot for you and making you suffer it.
I wish there had been a better way—another story in which we could all live together.
But you are the last element, the one who can end this cycle of death.
I laid out everything in Foresyth so you would slowly come to know its true nature, and the depth of its darkness, without being consumed by it.
I couldn’t trust anyone, even the other students.
If the Meister was using me, he surely could be using the others.
I made sure that you would be the only one with the full story.
Maybe that was a mistake, but it’s too late now.
You are almost to the end. But you’re not there yet.
Take these letters as proof to the Council and have them see how corrupt the Meister has become.
Until this moment, there hasn’t been enough evidence to convict him.
But my grand exit and written words ensured that there would be enough to challenge his rule.
If you find my mother, maybe she’ll help you, if she feels remorse over my death.
If you’ve gotten this far, then I know we would have been friends. But maybe, despite being separated by space and time, we can still solve this together.
Cheers!
Your dearest brother, Julian
When I finished re-reading the letters, I closed my eyes, trying to steady my racing heart.
If nothing else, I had answers. The truth pulsed through me, rushing to my head, filling every vein.
Now I understood why the Meister had brought me to Foresyth, why I’d felt so compelled to unravel the mystery of Julian’s death, and why the magick called to me.
It was in my blood.
And most sickening of all was how Julian had treated this all like a game—his magnum opus. He treated his very own life like a puzzle, like one of Aspen’s sculptures meant to be shattered. Like . . . Sequoia, drowning herself in the name of a God who wasn’t even the source of her power.
And yet, here I had been—obsessed over finding Julian’s killer, when he had discarded his life all along, refusing to fight. He had claimed to be under the manipulation of the Meister, but surely his genius could have found another way than to use his death to set off a chain reaction.
I tasted sourness on my tongue.
Something told me that Julian hadn’t minded dying—that if it served a purpose, it was worth it. His lack of sanctity for his own life felt like the greatest betrayal of all. I could have ignited with rage, but I pressed it down and channeled it into something useful: a plan.
I had to save the other students, even if they were too stupid to value their own lives.
Julian had said the final piece of the puzzle would be showing this evidence to the Council—that they could be trusted to enact justice.
But I was tired of playing his game, of retracing my father’s footsteps.
I was tired of feeling like there was something wrong with me for feeling too much.
That my intuition was any less powerful than my logic.
Ignoring his gut, hiding his feelings—that’s what had gotten my father killed. And following someone else’s plan, along with his own hubris, had gotten Julian killed.
I was done with all of it.
I was done listening to men who thought they knew better than me—especially now that they were both dead. I was done believing that following my instincts was a weakness, that secrecy was power, that solitude was strength.
No, I wasn’t going to follow Julian’s plan anymore. Or walk in my father’s shadow.
I had something very, very different in mind.