The Briar Society

1 Endri 1 When you get a random trove of hundreds of magically clandestine documents quite literally dumped into your inbox, there’s only one logical response: organize. Okay, fine, maybe I started reading a bit first, because who wouldn’t? A secret society, hidden websites, and entire year’s worth of events happening right under our noses . . . But I soon realized that without some sense of organization, nothing was going to make any sense. I’ve done my best to group these materials in a way that makes narrative sense, falling roughly into three acts. From what I was able to gather in working backwards and reading everything through, most of these materials appeared to the Briars at random, with no warning or any kind of set schedule. Luckily for me, I also received the Briars’ accompanying forum responses to each enigmatic post, or I don’t think I’d have had any guiding sense as to where this story was going. But to know where this strange new story ends, you need to know where it starts. Let’s call this the beginning of Act One. A beginning born from a message written by a dear, and long-lost friend. The_Well:“Welcome to The Briar Society.” Like Jurassic Park, but not a disaster. I’ve rehearsed that line a hundred times. I’d never admit how excited I am because these are just my daydreams. Still, I do dream about a moment where I introduce dozens of people to a secret literary society that works in the shadows to fight for the light. For now, though, it’s me, Bash, and Aether, working in a cold brownstone, fighting for the last crispy wonton. The total sum membership of the Briar Society since the manor fell, and we’ve been on the run. How did we get here? The past 18 months have been a blur of panic, pain, and revelation. It started with the box. That was the beginning. The locked coffin containing what the Monarchs dubbed the “Encyclopedia Magimystica.” I’d just come to the manor, and Ascender wanted me to focus on the box. I was reluctant because, well, locked coffins, in my opinion, should mostly stay that way. The lock itself looked like a fancy skeleton key wrapped around a letter B. The teeth of the key kind of looked like two number 3s. Ascender said he’d half-remembered that symbol for decades, and it might’ve even been where he got the idea for Basecamp 33. “B33.” I love a good lore reveal, but the coffin was magimystically sealed, the Monarchs had spent years trying to open it to no avail, and we eventually moved on to the rest of the manor’s library and trying to repair the digital catalog that had been destroyed in the initial raid. It was my idea to recruit Aether for that job, and I’m glad I did. We wouldn’t have that database, or the well if it weren’t for him. Then things started crumbling, the Silver reared their heads again, and Ascender sacrificed himself to try and protect us all. The determiner spell didn’t reach to the manor, so we were on borrowed time. We started offloading books and objects to secret locations while trying to figure out where we were going to go and what we were going to do when the Silver came back. Then Bash and Aether found what was essentially the table of contents for the coffin. The “Encyclopedia Magimystica” was actually a collected history and knowledge of something called the Briar Society. A network of organizations, or “branches,” that existed in the Book of the Wild for centuries, dedicated to the exploration, protection, and benevolent practice of magic. In those last days at the manor, my sole focus turned to finding a way to open the coffin. Yes, it felt like hope, whatever was inside that box, but it was also Ascender’s unfulfilled wish, and I owed him that much. This first message, posted by a user called “The_Well” in a hidden area of the Ackerly Green forum called “The Briar Society,” caught everyone who could see it quite off-guard. This area of the forum appeared to be restricted to about thirty-five Mountaineers, all of whom rapidly alternated between the shock of finding the message at all, and that of surmising the identity of the post’s author. Though they didn’t explicitly identify themself in the post, there was only one person who could have written this message. One person close enough to Bash and Aether to recruit them to her cause, one person who we knew had been at Monarch’s Manor with Ascender when he performed the Determiner-12 spell, a dangerously experimental protection spell which created a safeguarding veil around Ackerly Green and the Mountaineers but failed to protect the Manor, costing Ascender his life. “Does this strike anyone else as funny?” Augustus_Octavian responded, via a comment on the forum thread that this post had created. “It’s about Endri, but it doesn’t seem to be posted by Endri. It references Bash and Aether in the third person, so I doubt it’s by either of them.” Despite having been in regular contact with Eaves since the Search for Magiq events of the summer of 2019, no one had heard from Endri, or any of the other original Basecamp 33 leaders, since the Day of Change, 2017. Eaves had also not given any indication of having heard from them. So, it was more than a little strange to read what could only be Endri’s words now, especially when they seemed less like a public-facing forum post and more like the private confessions of a personal journal. This missive, wherever it came from, seemed to confirm that she had remained with Ascender since the Day of Change, as the Mountaineers had suspected after learning of his sacrifice during The Search for Magiq. But what Bash and Aether had been up to until now had remained a mystery, as was whoever had posted this indirect message to a hidden area of the forum, and why. “Could it be that this is something that was written privately by Endri but then transmitted to us by “The Well”, whatever that is?” wondered Wyvern. “Like a journal entry or something. It also seems like it’s in a quote format, not written directly by the Well, if that makes sense, like it was taken from somewhere else and copied here.” Neither Wyvern nor any of the other members of this new group had yet discovered the hidden application sharing this information with them, only the resulting posts on the forum. It wasn’t until later that the Mountaineers would discover the forum posts were copies of content being shared from a central database hidden within Ackerly Green’s own site. Sorrel agreed that the message read most like a journal entry, which begged another question: “If the Well they found is what/who sent this message, do our Three Musketeers know it was sent?” The next message, which appeared a few days later, wouldn’t answer Sorrel’s question exactly, but it would provide more insight into the last days of the Manor, and all but confirm Endri as the proprietor of these thoughts.