Ackerly Green’s Secret Society

3. The Ackerly Green Secret Society

3

The Ackerly Green Secret Society

Saberlane: December 12, 2017First, hello, and if you're wondering who I am and why I'm emailing you, at some point, you joined a group called the Mountaineers and you worked to unlock a mysterious novel called The Book of Briars, a series of events that has come to be called The Monarch Papers.

I can't believe it's been almost two years since all of this started. We've learned magic (or magiq) is real and fading from the world, we've unlocked The Book of Briars. We even found a pocket world called “Neithernor,” and now we're all wondering what’s going to happen next.

Well, as we begin to unpack (literally and figuratively) the history of Ackerly Green Publishing, we've begun to find some interesting things. Not least of which are materials from something called the Ackerly Green Secret Society.

The original email featured a photo of a small cardboard box filled with about a hundred hippocampus pins on black paper backings. The pins were approximately an inch and a half tall, and a deep bronze color that appeared gold in the light. The outline of the hippocampus was raised, almost serrated, like the scales of a dragon, which traveled across its pointed ears to its forked tongue, raised forelegs, and down the length of its small body to its curled tail, which looped in front of its trunk at the bottom.

Orvin Wallace (the executor of the Green estate and expert on all things AGP) and I found a box of pins in a storage unit that held documents and materials from the first iteration of Ackerly Green Publishing way back in the 1950s.

At first, we thought they were just promotional materials, a golden hippocampus, the company's mascot.

And then I put one on.

And very strange things started happening:

I found myself feeling “called” to wander around the city while I was wearing it—like when Sullivan Green said Central Park “talked” to him.

I also started receiving strange notifications on my phone that would disappear before I could capture them or write them down.

I’m not completely certain it was the pin making these things happen . . . but they always happened when I was wearing the pin. It felt like the pin was trying to show me something.

And then one night I was going through old Ackerly Green documents, as I do most nights now, when I found a handwritten note that read, Share them. Share it all. It’s the only way to put everything together. To keep the truth, and wonder, alive.

I have absolutely no reason to believe that this note was about the pins, but it felt like it answered a question I’d been asking myself.

What we've all been asking since we unlocked The Book of Briars . . .

What now?

So we're restarting the Ackerly Green Secret Society and sharing the (limited number of) pins with those of you who have joined this strange, wonderful journey. Let’s see if we can “put everything together.”

Almost forty brave souls signed on to receive a Herman the Hippocampus pin and revitalize the Ackerly Green Secret Society, not including Saberlane, Saberlane’s assistant Devin, or myself, as I came on when the Society and its many intricacies were already in full swing. No one was exactly sure what they had signed up for, but they took to wearing their Herman pins proudly on jackets and hats throughout the winter.

Saberlane continued with his regular updates from the publisher’s desk, which had become a blog of sorts: about the company, about magic, about coming to terms with magic in his own life and figuring out what to do now that The Monarch Papers had concluded. The posts reminded the Mountaineers of everything they had accomplished, and more often than not, left them feeling as though there was something still left to do. No one could quite put their finger on it just yet, but through Saberlane’s next two posts, it became clear that something strange was at work in the Ackerly Green offices, and that the Secret Society members, in particular, would be needed sooner than they had thought.