1 - Myra Lockwood

Despite Myra’s best efforts, or perhaps because of it, they were about to be late for school.

How did this happen? What will you do, if anything, to try to make it in time?

Myra's alarm clock was still on european time, and if it wasn't for her grandmother, she would have oversleeped. Last Friday, she came home from an extended trip to Italy and Greece. Some of her parents' old friends were funding an archaeological dig, and she was invited as an intern / volentear / unpaid labour.
The important bit was to be there and be a part of history and the recovery of it.

Myra was walking fast and energetically. When she left home, she was almost running, but the further she got away from the house, the feeling of urgency lessened. She didn't want to arrive late, but she didn't want to arrive sweaty either.

With a good pace, she starts to ponder this, her last year.
She wants to write a comprehensive report of her Mediterranean adventure, and hopefully convince the Smithsonian or similar prestigious institutions that she would be a good candidate to unearth forgotten history.
The fruits of her archaeological adventure were not impressive; they found an old fishing vessel that carried a soldier of somekind. Net and fishing hooks, along with a sword. They argued about romanticising a narrative about a an armed agent on a secret mission. There were no facts to support this claim.
The experience was still valuable and should open a few doors for her.

Teenagers on the cusp of adulthood weren't typically given to superstition and other such easily-dismissed thoughts. But if there were a chance for hindsight years from now, the Awakened ones of the Class of '26 might be able look back to as early as their first day of school to realise that change was in the ether. Perhaps it was the greater weave of fate that pushed against their coming back, as if delaying them, keeping them away from the penumbral shores, from what was about to happen.

But they wouldn't have known that of course. To them, the situation was simply that they would be late. Myra, for all her wealth, walked to school. There were others also legging their way up the gentle incline of the long driveway, as buses and cars whizzed past them. She found herself keeping her pace even though some of those ahead of her already began to quicken their step, and a few behind her also stepped faster to overtake her. Did she need to start running again just to make it on time?

Myra speeds up, wills herself to move up the driveway effortlessly. She feels like she is getting a gentle push like the wind is with her, but it fails to increase her speed significantly.

If anything, to the other students traipsing up the last stretch, Myra looked as if she had caught a gust of wind which threatened to propel her forward but instead made her trot forward a bit more clumsily in her haste to make it on time. "Come along!" A fellow student, she didn't know whom, brushed past her, giving Myra the impression that this student was strangely more fleet-footed than she was despite her magick.

The Library was the building next to the gymnasium. When the students were dismissed, Myra had thought to see how to get hold of Cass, but it seemed like the ever-conscientious student council president appeared to continue to busy herself with helping the teachers clear the hall. Myra made a mental note to try to get hold of her soon if she could, which meant she could now pursue the other pressing train of thought in her head. Clutching her notebook tightly, she crossed over to the Lower Stacks, which was what almost everyone called the library, on account of the fact that the lower two floors were the ones open to the student population.

"Myra, are you bringing the next group -" The warm voice that greeted her was Mdm Esme Silverton, the librarian, but Silverton stopped short when she realised that Myra came alone, as opposed to bringing another group of enthusiastic freshmen for an orientation tour of the library.

Myra returned the greeting, but charged past her, single-mindedly headed to research the symbols, worried that they might vanish even though she was sure she drew them in her notebook. There was hardly anyone using the library; it was after all the first day of school, no one stayed back to do research or prep homework or mug for exams. This also meant the library wouldn't be open too late, Myra didn't have that much time to do what she wanted.

Having spent years with the Library club and rising to a position of seniority, Myra knew the ins and outs of the place, and her seniority also permitted her to the closed shelf sections. She went one floor up to the third floor, the Upper Stacks, certain that there was a shelf or two on secret histories and arcane languages...

Myra knew that she had seen these symbols before.

The public library is a familiar place, a safe place—the kind of safety that comes from rules and hush and the promise that the world will stay in its lanes if you do. There are shelves here that bear a small brass plate with a name she has grown up seeing on invitations and bookplates: DONATED BY THE LOCKWOOD FAMILY. It is not pride, exactly - it’s lineage. It’s the quiet claim that she belongs in the place of knowledge.

It’s those deep shelves she’s searching now.

Occult / comparative religion, modern witchcraft and Wicca paperbacks with shiny covers. And tucked among them like someone tried to hide a blade in a drawer of spoons: thin, sober volumes that look like academic work. There are even a few ledgers and bound dissertations with university stamps, the kind of thing you don’t read for fun unless you really need to put references into your assignment.

The titles are bland on purpose Modern Esoteric Societies, A Field Guide to Contemporary Mysticism, Paradigms of Will. Nothing that screams occult or magic, just boring stuff the casual eye slides off.

Myra pulls one free, then another. She sits on the floor with the ledgers before her and her open notebook beside her, and begins to leaf through them with the brisk patience she uses on any text that might be irrelevant. Skim. Index. Table of contents. Glossary. The places where truth has to show itself.

She turns a page, and the first symbol appears.


Her stomach drops in a very specific way: the feeling of seeing something you recognise without having permission to recognise it. Like her hand knows the shape before her mind can justify it. Like a word in a language she was never taught.

For a moment, she goes very still. Myra’s fingers tighten on the paper as if she can hold the page in place through force of will.

The text doesn’t say magic is real. It says something much more dangerous to Myra, they speak her language of logic:

There are multiple models for how reality can be influenced. They disagree on the story, but they share repeatable results.

It lays out nine Traditions, framed like schools of thought—each with a worldview, tools, training methods, and typical phenomena. Myra doesn’t buy the mysticism, but she spots the pattern. A way of mentally reshaping how you observe the universe through symbols, tools, ritual and structures - changing the observer, changing the system.

She reads them the way she reads anything that matters: not as factions, not as superstition, but as competing methodologies, ways of doing the same impossible math.

Order of Hermes.
This reads like home. Structured practice. Inherited systems. Symbolic languages that behave like code. It doesn’t even matter if the author is sensationalising, because Myra recognises the voice of it: rules, proofs, hierarchies, correspondences. This isn’t belief, its tried and tested. This is the curriculum.
She underlines a line too hard and snaps her pencil lead clean in half.

Virtual Adepts.
A modern cousin: reality as information, systems, and exploits. Myra doesn’t fully understand the jargon, but she understands the posture. If the world runs on rules, you can hack rules. Hermes translated into circuitry and clean interfaces.

Sons of Ether.
Renegade scientists: impossible devices, theories that work because their makers insist they do. A tradition that treats reality like a machine with undocumented features.
Somehow it makes her think of her father. Not a memory, but a sense of his presence, the idea of his laugh she can’t quite hear.

Akashic Brotherhood.
Discipline of body and mind; clarity through practice. She doesn’t romanticize it, but it scans as internally consistent: training produces results. She respects that. The method may be different, but the discipline is familiar.
She thinks of Zen monks that masters inhuman feats.

Celestial Chorus.
She expects religion and finds something closer to consensus psychology: faith as a unifying equation. She doesn’t like it, too much surrender, too much because we say so, yet she can’t dismiss it because it’s also structured. A single axiom applied relentlessly until it changes the room.

Verbena.
Biology mixed with ritual—life, blood, cycles. Harder for her to accept until she realizes it’s simply a different set of variables: not numbers, living systems. She doesn’t want it to be true. That’s not the same as it not being coherent.

Dreamspeakers.
This one triggers irritation, too interpretive, too story-based, until she notices the repeated emphasis on relationship and negotiation rather than meaning. Not symbolism for symbolism’s sake. Protocol with entities. That, annoyingly, is a kind of structure.

Cult of Ecstasy.
She expects the hippy teacher and gets something closer to neuroscience: altered states as instrumentation. Time perception, attention, the subjective lens. Myra doesn’t like it, but she understands it. Changing the observer changes the system.

Euthanatos.
This is where she goes cold. Not because it’s "evil," but because it’s brutally pragmatic: death as a rule, endings as leverage. It reads like someone using a theorem she tries not to look at, because the math checks out and she hates what it implies. Entropi is a bitch.

By the time she reaches the end of the section, her notebook margin is full of cramped, controlled handwriting. Her pulse is steady only because she makes it steady.

These are her faded symbols. There were two more, but they are not here in these legers. Legeres that is going home with her. Nine Traditions. Nine toolkits. Nine ways to change the mind and, by changing the mind, change the world.

Different languages. Different rituals. Different instruments.
But the same proof.

And the most frightening part is not that it’s real.

It’s that she understands it.

She saw snakes stretching towards Joe main auditorium. Her hand rests on the Order of Hermes' serpent's head crest. Connections, lines, snakes and ladders. As her mind is toying with the idears er eyes are resting on the cart of books that needs to be shelved. Myra sees thin golden threads between each book and its spot on the shelf. Almost all of the books are pointing towards the same section, but there is one that points down into the basement. She can't help but examine this outlier. Inside a large textbook about geology, she finds a glossy magazine. Some students must have hidden his, and Myra is sure that it is a male student, an erotic magazine in a textbook and forgotten to retrieve it.
Part of her is horrified, and part of her finds it extremely funny.

There was so much to take in that it was overwhelming. Myra would've completely lost track of time were it not for Silverton who signaled her approach with some loud walking steps, as if to give Myra time to pretend all was in good order, "School's closing early, I'm here to shoo you away. Continue tomorrow?" Myra wondered if the librarian was giving her a slight knowing smile, but Silverton walked away before Myra could think of asking her anything.

Her head full of thoughts and ideas, Myra walks home.

"Have a seat." Despite the serious formality of the title of Doctor, Veritas was generally regarded as a motherly figure amongst the staff, more youthful in appearance than one might guess her true age to be, though her chopped bob and bangs, slightly streaked in grey, gave her some kindly gravitas to match.

The counselling room was furnished with soft armchairs and a table for the counsellor, carpeted but enclosed with no natural light. A small shelf sat to one side with a tray of glasses and a water flask.

Today though the shelf was partially blocked by a third person in the room."Ms Nixon will join us today as well, as part of the school's efforts to improve our care programme." The woman looked as proper as she did yesterday, again in nearly the same shade of grey suit. In her hand was a tablet and stylus.

"How are you doing at the moment Myra? I am concerned about what you may have experienced at yesterday's blackout. Can you tell me a bit about what's going on with you right now? I'm ready to listen if you're willing to share." So that’s what the school was calling it, a blackout.

Her tone was gentle, but nonetheless probing..

Yesterday, when Myra came home, she stepped over the threshold and felt at home, at peace, as if a warm blanket was put around her. But for the first time, she also noticed that, like a blanket, her movement and expressions were hampered by the heavy cloth. Not an issue if you were sitting on the couch or in bed doing nothing, but the idea of looking up the symbols and traditions in her family library evaporated while she was having dinner with her Grandmother.
It was when she got to school that she remembered that we didn't look up the symbols and traditions in the family library. It has put her a little on edge.

Before this counselling session, she had a chat with her classmates and realised that the staff were hiding something important.

Thank you, Dr Veritas. I'm surprised to see a guidance counsellor in this session. Two on one, to talk about a simple blackout that is a bit much, isn't it? Unless it was not a blackout.

In that case, I am concerned about what the school is hiding.
Are we safe?


This was a tad more rebellious and confrontational than Myra expected herself to be, but she schooled her face not to give away the surprise of her own words.

The same disconcerting feeling Myra had yesterday as her eyes darted to Nixon even as she evaded Veritas' questions was amplified, for the guidance counsellor from the Board of Education revealed no expression even though Myra had explicitly mentioned the grey suited woman.

Nixon scribbled something briefly on her tablet and said nothing, whereas Veritas always warmer and assuring, resumed the conversation. "Stress can sometimes make us see events negatively. Did you see or hear something that made you feel less safe yesterday? Did you speak with anyone that made you feel this way? Why don't you tell me why you feel this way."

Veritas did not rise to Myra's baiting, not did she react to Myra's more confrontational tone, for Myra had still maintained the proper decorum and respect in speaking with a member of staff. She was used to handling students, not as disciplinarian, but as counsellor. She made no mention of any discrepancy in truth, but turned the questions towards what version Myra was going to bring to the table.

Myra had the feeling though that the version of the story she chose to tell was somehow important to herself personally. That it would shape how she dealt with her newly experienced reality in some way. Sure, she could try to convince Veritas, but could she affect herself in the process?

I feel less safe now with this investigation with this stranger I don't know.

Why is Ms Nixon part of this investigation?

Myra's point was a reasonable one. To her, Dr Isabella Veritas was a long time member of staff even before Myra joined the school four years ago, and as far as she knew, Veritas was in charge of counselling for the last three years. The forbidding Ms Nixon was entirely new to the school, and here she was, sitting in on a typically private session.

Her defiance was finally enough to provoke a response from Nixon. The expressionless woman will the bunned-up hair adjusted her spectacles ever so slightly, and spoke, "Guidance, not investigation," she murmured. While the words were directed at Myra's challenge, they seemed more to be about setting the existing atmosphere correctly to counter Myra's stated position than about admonishing Myra.

In fact it was Veritas who quickly resumed with, "Myra, it seems to me that you are more affected by this incident than you realise, and are not yet ready to talk about it. We will make a note of this, and resume another time. Or when you feel differently, let Ms Young know so we can continue."

The answer was opaque; there was nothing else Myra could wrangle from the adults here before she was dismissed. In the back of her head she was already thinking about the esoteric skewing of this place and wondered if that was affecting her responses. She had tried very hard to reject the narrative she felt was being imposed on her, and to some degree she succeeded. Her mind was clear, for now.

Myra nods and leaves the session.
Her story branch joins the main story here