The Briar Archive

9. Ascender-1

Ascender

“Ascender went through so much alone. What is he up to now, I wonder?”

Ginger

I was facing a bit of a problem. Part of me was happy to have found the Mountaineers once again after so many years, but I was also once-bitten. It had taken me a long time to reacclimate to the mundane after trying to climb that last mountain.

Was Dr. Brightwell back? Were any of them? Curiosity got the better of me, so I entered my first name and email address into the form at the end of the Guide.

Someone out there had to have the answers, but for a lot of reasons, I still wasn’t convinced it was the Mountaineers. They’d been missing for twenty years and had little to show for it other than getting the Guide online. Which, in fairness, was more than they had been able to do in the 90s. Still, I had little idea who they were back then and even less of an idea of who they were now.

That changed when I received a welcoming email.

EAVES:Hey Martin,

I’m Eaves. I’m sort of in charge of communications for the Mountaineers. And you’re a Mountaineer now too! So welcome!

I’m gonna cut to the chase because things seem to be moving pretty quickly and Ascender (fearless leader) wants you up to speed ASAP. Check out the intro post Ascender put up on Basecamp33, the site we set up so we can all share information. It’ll explain what we’re trying to do, and how we need your help to do it. You’ll definitely want to check it out today, because something big happened over the weekend. Like . . . big.

Itsuki runs a page you can join on f*******: to discuss everything with other Mountaineers. I’m not gonna bombard you with email (Bash says too much traffic on the server might draw unwanted attention anyway), so the sss page will show any major events in your newsfeed while you go about your regular life.

Though, once you know what we know, you won’t be able to go back to anything resembling “regular” ever again.

As for the Book of Briars website, we don’t know what it is, who put it up, or why. It might be a game. It might be a hoax. Or it might be the answer to everything.

Read the rhyme hidden in the borders.

Crazy times, but we’re so excited you’re on board.

The other Mounties aren’t always big on being available, but I’m never more than an email away. If you need anything, feel free.

Welcome and talk soon,

Eaves

“Read the rhyme hidden in the borders.” I wasn’t quite sure what Eaves was getting at, so I examined the locked Book of Briars again. Indeed, there was faint script lining the left and right borders of the book. I couldn’t believe that I had completely overlooked this (now glaringly obvious) clue.

The rhyme said:

Sixteen chapters locked within, truth and treasure you might win. The gathered parts unlock the door, beyond is what you’re searching for.

Frankly, it sounded like the rules of a board game, but the Mountaineers had already thrown themselves into the rhyme’s implications and what it meant that The Book of Briars had shown up now that they had a book from the Lost Collection.

The email from Eaves also contained a link to the Mountaineers’ website, Basecamp33.

When I reached the site, I couldn’t help but feel overwhelmed. The Mountaineers had been doing their homework, and they’d put everything they had up on their site. I was impressed but unsure where to start.

Thankfully, the Mountaineers had planned for that, as evidenced by the first selection in the header of their site: Start Here.

The link brought me to their very first post. Though it recounted some information I already knew, it also answered some of the many questions bouncing around my head.

We believe the world is changed. We believe history has been amended. We don’t know who did it, or how. And we don’t know why. But we know it’s true. (I’ll explain further down.) But the gist is we remember events differently than history wants us to believe they happened. We remember fragments of an alternate history.

The existence of the Guide to Magic is proof that at some point a company called Ackerly Green published the Magiq Guide as part of a collection of books. And it’s proof that something happened to us, to the world, to erase all those books from history. Why? What was in them? What were we not supposed to see?

See, a lot of us Mountaineers remember those books. It’s how we found each other. We’re from all over the world, all walks of life, but it’s the one thing we share. We don’t know how, but we believe those books, which we call the Lost Collection, are at the core of all of this.

We’ve been looking for these books our whole lives.

That’s why we recreated the Magiq Guide and put it online. In hopes people would read it and share it. The more people who hear the truth, the better chance we have of not being silenced again. And the better chance we have of unraveling the greatest mystery of our time.

We thought the Guide would help. Put more eyes on the case, so to speak.

But nothing could prepare us for what happened on July 17th.

A lot of the Mountaineers spend their free time reading old reference books, catalogs, searching the Internet for references to the Lost Collection (what we called the Magiq Guide and its companions). Myself included. We have book dealers looking for them and Google alerts about them.

That’s what woke me up in the middle of the night on July 17th. An alert that something about the books was posted online. The Book of Briars.

We don’t know who built it. We don’t know what it’s for. It might be a hoax. It might be a game.

Or it might be the truth trying to break through the lies we’ve been told. We believe there is, or was, magic in the world. It’s the only explanation. How else could someone change time, our memories?

Why are these occult books at the center of all of this?

Maybe it scared someone. Maybe it wasn’t meant to be read, or learned. But we deserve to know the truth. I’ve spent the past few days looking over the site. And then I noticed writing in the border of the book cover . . .

What does it mean?

Why did it only show up when we posted the Guide online?

You.

We can’t do this alone. We’ve kept quiet, secret, in the past and it cost us.

But together, out in the open, we might be able to see through the lie.

This site is just as much for you as it is for us.

Comment on the posts, contact us, follow the f*******: page, discuss on the forum, share content you think might help us uncover the truth.

Back in the mid-90s, when the Mountaineers formed the first organized forum online to discuss the LC (Lost Collection), someone shared a handwritten occult pamphlet they’d found in an estate sale, titled Monarch’s Mountain. It detailed a secret society of the same name that was dedicated to the collection and preservation of “lost” artifacts and literature. The pamphlet made some questionable claims, such as that the group had saved the contents of the Library of Alexandria before it burned, and that Atlantis was a galactic library. People looking for the Ackerly Green books back then liked the idea of a secret society dedicated to lost books, so they started calling themselves Mountaineers.

I had a vague recollection of someone from the original group, the ’94s, sharing pages from that pamphlet on the forum but didn’t have a copy in any of my notes from back then. I’d been fighting to stay on the wagon and off unemployment on a daily basis and some things just fell by the wayside.

Crazy as some of these ideas seemed, the forums turned out to be an incredible resource for understanding what the Mountaineers were doing and why. It helped me connect a few pieces that I had been struggling with for the past quarter century. Though it was a bit strange to read about the Mountaineers after all these years, the new people in charge seemed passionate and well-intentioned. Instead of harboring an atmosphere of secrecy, they sought to open their quest to the world in the hope that the more people involved, the more likely they were to find the truth.

Eaves, the Gossmere leader and the one acting as counselor and human resources for the group, had reservations about making the forum public—and knowing what little I did about what happened to the original Mountaineers, I couldn’t blame him.

Eaves:I know this was the (Ascender’s) plan but publishing the Guide online . . . there’s suddenly so many things that could go wrong. So many variables we can’t plan for. No one here needs to be reminded of what happened to the last organized group of Mounties.

I mean, I’m on board. Completely. But these other people . . . They don’t know what they’re getting themselves into. Not really. I don’t know, last minute jitters, I guess.

Ascender. He was one of the originals, someone I called a friend, as much as you could call someone you’d never met a friend, but he’d disappeared with Knatz and all the rest. I wished that Eaves would be a bit more forthcoming with what had happened to them. I knew something bad happened the last time they went down this road, and that was something the new recruits probably should be aware of. Still, it was comforting to see Eaves’ hesitation.

The core Mountaineers were clearly moral people who didn’t want anyone getting hurt in their quest to open the book. The more I read, the harder it was to distrust or doubt them. I had the impression that Eaves’ concern for his friends, new and old, outweighed his need for answers. It was an admirable quality that I wasn’t sure I myself had. Endri, the Thornmouth leader, was in charge of disseminating information on the site, and her witty and bookish but friendly demeanor helped draw people into the mystery they were all trying to solve. The Mountaineers also had a Flinterforge leader and tech guru named Bash who appeared to prefer working in the background, maintaining the site rather than directly interacting with any of the others online, but he was always quick to address any technical snafus that arose. The last of the core Mountaineers, Itsuki, the Balimora leader, was more of a field researcher, a husband and father living in London, gathering whatever information he could find out in the world and bringing it back to “Basecamp 33.”

Following Eaves’ introduction, there was a post from founding Mountaineer Ascender titled “Sully’s Heir”—Sully being Sullivan Green, son of the cofounder of Ackerly Green Publishing and the poor guy who had recently passed away.

Ascender:Bash and I tracked down the firm handling Sully’s estate. Turns out it’s the same attorney who tried to help us find Sully in 1997. Couldn’t get him to call back. Tried for almost two weeks.

Finally got a paralegal on the line, said we were an interested party. She checked, told us she was only authorized to disclose information about his estate once they had located his legal heir.

Sully Green has an heir? If so, does that mean he had someone named as heir, or does it mean there are more AG Greens than we realized?

He would’ve had to hide that pretty thoroughly. If that’s the case, why? Looks like we might have an heir to find.

I wondered if Sullivan had been the source of the ’94s’ collection of spells and rituals.

As I continued to poke around the site, I learned that they’d eventually tracked down Sullivan’s heir, and heir to Ackerly Green Publishing.

Ascender:I’ve had a Google alert for “Sullivan Green” set up for years. This morning I got a hit. I doubt I’m the only one. The hit came from his daughter’s blog. Her name is Deirdre Green. And as far as I know she’s in New York City, right now. Landed Friday night.

There’s no way to email her (Bash, can you get on this?) so I reached out via comment. Don’t want to spook her. I’m poring over her past posts now.