The Briar Society

2. Endri 2

2

Endri 2

The_Well:Dreaming about fire. In the end, that’s how the Manor fell, and I’m still getting my head around it. There’s no way of knowing if the Silver caused it or if it was something as simple as faulty wiring. The place was old, but I wouldn’t put the Silver above burning it down if they couldn’t have its contents. The rest of the Monarchs had moved on. Knatz was in another country, and almost everything had been offloaded at that point anyway. Most everything except the coffin.

We’d tried everything to open it, but it seemed like it was a lock that had lost its key.

But—Aether and Bash were working on the genius idea of actually using the “aetherization” trap to gain access to the contents. It started when I found an entry in the Manor’s database about research into the process of “aetherization.” They posited that maybe that didn’t mean destroyed at all and that the contents, the knowledge in the coffin whether material or not, could be somehow reconstituted by the safe keepers, instead of being utterly destroyed. They wondered why you would allow such precious contents to be destroyed without some way of safeguarding it.

Bash and Aether’s Plan Z proposal was to break the coffin open and trigger the trap that would dissolve the “Encyclopedia Magimystica” while Aether’s mind was “logged into” the Wi-Fi mesh we’d set up in the Manor. He would then try and capture the data of the aetherized books, effectively scanning them into a database. It was speculative, nothing more than theory, and none of us knew if the books would turn to magimystic data, some unscannable gibberish, or nothing at all—just dust.

We also didn’t know if the Encyclopedia Magimystica was an actual book collection. What if the coffin held nothing but nebulous information? What if there was a real body in the coffin, and you could ask the corpse questions about anything? What if there were books inside but because they weren’t supposed to be in this age, they would turn to nothing like The Little Red House?

So we sat on the idea and stewed (and had dreams/nightmares about corpses who were fathomless fonts of knowledge.)

But the fire made the choice for us. We were a skeleton crew at that point. Bash, Aether, Wilona, Marcus, and me. I saw flickering outside my bedroom window and thought it was fireworks. Silent fireworks. That image sticks with me even now.

But the light was the Manor going up in flames.

I woke everyone up, forcing them to the basement, to an old waterworks passage just in case the Silver was outside, but Aether and Bash refused because they knew the coffin was going to be destroyed. They knew how much it meant, to Ascender, to me, to the new age. They wanted to try their plan while the building was coming down.

Aether would log into the Wi-Fi magimystically, Bash would monitor the database Aether would attempt to scan the information into, and I would smash the coffin.

We tried. I still mull the sequence of events. I couldn’t smash open the coffin; it was protected, so Bash and I dragged it out of the library, down the smoke-filled hall, and dumped it over the stair railing, down to the first-floor entryway. It cracked open, and I saw the books inside just before they vanished, just before a wall collapsed, and fire flooded the first floor. Then the power blew. We had to carry Aether’s unconscious body out of a second-floor window, hoping he’d escaped the network before it went down.

We’d failed pretty spectacularly, but there were only so many variables we could account for. Fire hadn’t been one of them. Bash and I hid in a motel outside of Philly with Aether’s body. He was unconscious for nearly twelve hours when we finally got an alert on Bash’s phone. He was alive, but we’d need fiber optic speed and clarity to get him back into his body. We couldn’t go back to Philly. There were probably other options, but at the time there was only one person I could think of to help us.

Saberlane.

We were taking Aether to New York.

To Ackerly Green Publishing.

At this point, it was clear that Endri was the only person who could be writing these messages. Nowhere in her messages did she mention any dates, times, or even seasons, so there was no way of knowing how long ago everything with the Manor happened, or when the trio had reached New York, if at all. If they had, this was certainly the first anyone had heard of their trip.

“Since these entries are clearly from the past, we can’t know where they are at this moment,” BrokenVoid observed, but even if the Mountaineers couldn’t know where the trio currently were, wouldn’t they have known if they had made it to Ackerly Green? If Endri, Bash, and Aether made it to Saberlane before his passing, was this information he would have withheld from them? And if so, why?

Both Nimueh and Augo realized, “Saberlane was on the same side of the Determiner spell as us. Maybe they never reached him.”

With the Determiner spell still safeguarding the Mountaineers, the forum, and Ackerly Green from most of the outside world, Robert noted that it was entirely possible that Endri, Bash, and Aether had been physically unable to find Saberlane, much like when Saberlane had gone looking for Martin Rank.

For my part, if the trio had reached out to Saberlane before his passing or had attempted any other means of contact with Ackerly Green, I knew nothing of it. All I knew, I was learning belatedly, following the trail of Endri’s messages along with everyone else.