The Search For Magiq

1. The 30-Day Spell

1

The 30-Day Spell

SpiritSeer: March 29, 2019, 1:00 PMHey, Mounties! Sorry to bother, but by chance were you the ones who put up a 30 Day Spell thing that was on i********: earlier in the week? I still know some friendly ghosts in the Low who refuse to cut ties with me (for now), and they assumed it was you posting it because of the #searchformagiq hashtag. So they reached out to me to ask you. Haaaaaa, I am totally a Mounty now.

There are Low sites that funnel in all kinds of things from the internet that seem to have a connection to Low-related stuff. Like, millions of things a week . . . I think the q in magiq set off an alert. I was just curious what you were up to—a community thing or what—because it’s gone now.

The use of magiq with a q also piqued the interest of the Mounties, but no one had seen any strange activity as of late. Those who searched the hashtag on i********: came up with nothing, and the Ackerly Green account was also looking suspiciously well-behaved. Spirit returned a few minutes later with a screenshot of the post in question, which appeared similar to the common templates used by bloggers and influencers for photo challenges. The picture had a header that read: “The 30 Day Spell,” and below that, “Cast the Spell. Begin the Path. #SearchForMagiq.” There were two columns of fifteen “prompts” flanking a black-and-white image of a feather, and the prompts were odd combinations of two or three words each, such as “the gloaming captured,” “colors unbound,” and “a soul reflected.”

With not much else to go off of, Spirit reached out again to see if there had been a caption attached somewhere, as the photo had apparently been posted to multiple social media outlets. It certainly seemed to be some kind of spell, but Spirit didn’t believe it had to be cast on i********: specifically.

“Oh man, this is spooky,” she updated when she had heard back from her connections in the Low. “Okay. So there was one caption from sss that was posted then deleted, but a bot caught it and cached it.”

The post with the image read:

Please, my friend needs help. Her daughter disappeared and left this picture in a text message that said “Capture every moment in a month of 30 days, in word or ink or images, a myriad of ways. Doesn’t matter where you put them, only matters that they’re caught. If you want to learn where magiq is then this is how you’re taught.” Does anyone know what this means?

“So definitely not the Mountaineers,” SpiritSeer concluded. Nor did it appear to be a coincidence that this image would surface just before the beginning of April, a month with thirty days.

“You know, I have a bunch of searches set up when things are posted online about ‘magiq,’” Saberlane posted in response. “I’ve had alerts for ‘#searchformagiq’ pop up a few times over the past year, and by the time I check them they’re always gone. I’m really curious about why the hashtag has been used and for what reason.”

Rimor suggested sharing the photo to the Ackerly Green account to see if that helped gain any traction—or at the very least elicit some kind of response from whoever had originally posted it—which might provide the Mountaineers with some answers. Saberlane agreed.

Though no one felt 100 percent comfortable about sharing the image without knowing where it came from, it seemed that all there was to do was trust in magiq and start casting the spell. Saberlane updated the image with Ackerly Green’s colors, and I shared it to the official AG i********: account. Meanwhile, the Mountaineers created a separate thread to share their contributions to the spell: photographs, pieces of artwork, excerpts of writing. They all interpreted the oddly specific “prompts” differently, and they were all uniquely beautiful.

After six days of posting for the challenge, Saberlane shared a link to a post from an account called “searchformagiq.” “The Ackerly Green i********: account was just tagged in this pic,” he wrote. “Was this one of us?”

The post was on a mostly golden background, with white stenciled flowers seeming to creep around the edges in a circular shape. The caption read:

Your intentions and purpose are beginning to come into focus. Please continue . . .

The post disappeared shortly after Saberlane linked to it on the forum. It was definitely not any of the Mountaineers, and although they felt no closer to discovering who was behind it, they felt encouraged enough to go on.

Six days later, another post appeared. The image was almost identical, save for more of the floral designs circling a glowing ball of light in the center. Saberlane posted a screenshot to the forum, to preserve it in case it disappeared like the previous post. The caption was similarly eerie:

We envision the factions and forces of the dying age being swept away, and new bonds being born in the dawn. Who are you? Do you share our vision? Our hope? Your intentions are becoming clearer. You are unexpected but not unwelcome. Is it true that we walk together into these dark hours?

These strange messages, seemingly directed towards the Mountaineers, only created more questions.

“The factions . . . Silver and Wool?” Oracle wondered. “A world without the Silver hoarding magiq, is that even possible?”

The messages began appearing every six days. The only differences among all of the images was the increasing amount of detail surrounding the central orb. Saberlane posted another screenshot of the third, which read:

Can it be true? We believed you were lost. But perhaps not lost, only somehow obscured, or pulled behind a veil too powerful for even the Herald to pierce? Were we wrong to doubt your resilience? The Mountaineers, alive? We want to hope, but need to be sure. Please continue.

All of the posts disappeared shortly after being shared to the forum, which reminded the earliest generation of Mountaineers of the Last Traveler’s fragmented posts. But there was one more detail from the most recent post that stood out as being strangely specific, yet completely unfamiliar to any of the Mountaineers.

“The ‘Herald.’ That’s a fascinating term,” Augustus_Octavian wrote. “Someone who goes before something, announces something to come.” Slightly ominous, but encouraging, nonetheless. If anything, it felt like a validation of sorts that the Mountaineers were on the right path, working towards something to come. They had no choice but to continue casting the spell, posting to the forum each day, according to the required prompt.

Augo was the first to find the fourth post from @searchformagiq, captioned:

Verso and Recto. Different, but still bound together now in our shared journey. After the day of change we thought you were lost, driven from the world. We are hopeful that we all were wrong. Have you felt it? The fundamental foundations of magic have broken and what remains is vanishing. But the Herald saw a distant light. A possible future. She was so much before she had to close her eyes. The sight took too much from the world. She called to one, but you also answered. We are close now. Please continue and confirm our hopes.

The message prompted further questions and concerns, mainly about the identity of this Herald—had she been the one causing magiq to splinter in our world? Who was the “one” she had called to—the call that the Mountaineers had unexpectedly answered? And why now had this mysterious messenger mentioned twice that they believed the Mountaineers to have been lost, when they had never gone anywhere at all?

The “Verso and Recto” line also reminded Augo of the promise they had discovered at the end of The Monarch Papers: “Book of the Wild, Book of Kings, two worlds rebound in butterfly wings.”

“Maybe they’re trying to say that our ‘books,’ being re-bound together are now two sides of the same page, or two separate pages now opposed together, face-to-face?” Augo wondered. No one was certain.

The fifth and final post arrived with the end of the month, and instead of the glowing orb, it featured one of the locks from the original cover of The Book of Briars in the center, the same image Saberlane had been using as his forum avatar for months. It said:

The new age is a book yet unwritten. Born from the ashes of wool and silver, built atop old deceits and broken laws, what could we make of this age together now that the Book of Kings is all but closed? Old threats have been exposed, but the depth of the shadow they hid within becomes clear. And in those depths, darker threats that must be countered by light, before they take hold of this coming age as well. No age is born in peace. You have shown your true purpose. It is the pursuit of wonder, hope, and light. This conduit will fade, but we will find other ways to reach you through the strange, leaden veil that hides you from the world. The Herald can’t risk looking into the dark with so little magic left but hold fast. There are other ways to reach one another. Seek out the Neithercouriers.

With so much to discuss and so few concrete answers, it seemed a new thread was in order.