1 - Myra Lockwood

Myra came home to the Lockwood estate, her mind full of questions. Old feelings were reopened about her parents, more unanswered questions. She had long since come to terms with their absence, thanks to grandmother Lockwood, the stabilising presence in her teenage life, but Cassandra Devereaux seemed to be very certain about her family's connection to magic. Myra had suspected, but recent events confirmed it. There was something special about her family.

Interestingly, Joe was more likely the only other person in their recent association who had a inkling of the world of the awakened. Sure, it was revealed to him in enigma and spirit and and mystery and dream, for that was the way his insights came to him when he was alone. Now was a chance to share his knowledge with the others, perhaps together they could dig into their past and uncover hidden truths.

Myra leads the way up the driveway. The rain has darkened the gravel, so it looks almost black. The driveway curves through old trees and stone walls that feel more like boundaries than decoration.

Myra adjusts the strap of her satchel and looks up at the house. The Lockwood estate sits back from the road like it was built to avoid being seen. Tall windows watch from behind heavy curtains. The roofline is all sharp angles and old gables. Ivy climbs where it has been allowed to climb.

Myra smiles as she can tell what her friend is thinking. It’s not… haunted. It just has a presence.

The front path is clean despite the weather. The stone steps are worn smooth in the middle from generations of feet. The air smells like wet leaves and brick, and something faintly clean underneath.
Myra taps her boot against the first step before she climbs it. The sound is quick and deliberate.

Myra notices her friend noticing. It’s for announcing yourself.
She taps the step a second time. My grandmother says it’s polite.

She unlocks the front door. The lock clicks with a crisp finality. The solid oak door opens without a creak, like it has been recently cared for.

Inside, the temperature drops just enough to feel intentional. The entry hall is wide and dim in a controlled way. Light falls where someone wanted it to fall. Darkness stays in the corners like it has been instructed to stay there.
The carpets swallow footsteps and the walls are thick. The silence is the kind that makes you lower your voice, even if no one asked you to.

Myra walks with practised steps; her pace is measured, like she knows the house’s timing.

Two doors along the corridor look perfectly normal. They have polished brass handles and well-kept panels. Myra’s eyes slide over them like they are not there.

Myra glances back to make sure her friend is still with her. You might feel a little turned around. She pauses for half a second.
Don’t panic. This place is just… particular.

The air changes when she opens the library door; warm lamplight spills onto the hallway, like a welcome that the rest of the house refuses to give. The smell of paper and leather settles in your lungs immediately, providing a sense of peace and contemplation.

Shelves rise higher than your head and keep going. With ladders that sit on rails like they are often used. A small brass plaque marks one section as a Lockwood donation. The books here look heavy and serious, and are handled with care.

Myra relaxes by a fraction as she steps inside. She sets her satchel down with the ease of someone returning to the only room that always makes sense. Myra touches the hexagon pendant at her throat without thinking. This is my favourite part of the house. I feel safe here.

She looks at her friend with a faint smirk that is warmer now. If you get lost, come back here.

Please wait here for a bit. I will find my grandmother and tell her we have a guest. She will insist on offering tea. Please accept, but feel free not to drink it, if you don't want to. Being a good host is important... Something is not said about being a good guest. Or guest-rites? Who knows? And what happened to the determined Myra that was hellbent on answers?
Myra leaves the library and returns a few minutes later.

Joe opts to go home with Myra; this is, after all, a new town to him, and while getting lost with a modern phone should be difficult, peering at a screen too often makes one vulnerable, especially in unfamiliar surroundings. The Lockwood house is… imposing.
"Where I come from, we’d say it certainly has character. There, you can mostly read the age of a building by its architecture, even if it runs in phases. Here, it’s more a case of what someone really wanted… how old is the house?" he wonders politely. He smiles nervously. "Please excuse my curiosity; reflexive history geek!"

---

Joe contemplates tapping the step as fast as he can, an exercise in weight transfer and balance, but decides against it; this isn’t a dance studio, nor a dojo. Instead he taps each foot once, deliberately and precisely, as if knocking upon a heavy door. "Courtesy is always an important tradition," he acknowledges. "When in Rome…" he smiles, confident that finishing the sentence is unnecessary.

---

The Lockwood house doesn’t just have character; it has presence. Indeed, it has what some martial artists might call "centre". Utter solidity; almost a sense of… fortitude? Watchfulness? Judgement, maybe? Joe has been in places which possessed such an atmosphere before, but never a private home, and never with such intensity. Finally he decides what the right word is: Gravity. In every sense. Joe feels that a light-hearted smile would be severely misplaced. His curiosity is not oppressed, however; rather, it is energised by an unfamiliar environment which he cannot help somehow feeling he should be able to understand on some level; he tries to take in everything.
All else apart, getting lost in someone’s home would be embarrassing.

---

So even Myra finds it hard to relax in much of the Lockwood house. Joe is not really surprised. "Thank you," he says, finally feeling welcomed rather than admitted. "I also tend to feel more comfortable in a library. And tea would be quite welcome!" With ancestry that could be superficially described as mostly-British-with-Asian-complications, this is literal truth for Joe; he’s intrigued by what kind of tea might arrive.
When Myra leaves, he sets off on a slow circuit of the room, touching nothing, but examining the books by title and organisation, seeing what impressions the library gives of the interests of those who created it and use it.

---

The brass plaque identifying the Lockwood donation is particularly curious; that implies that the Lockwoods only contributed part of the library. That suggests some divide, or change, of ownership.

Joe half expected a coat-tailed servant to turn up with refreshments, given the grand size of the estate. Instead of cutting through Ashford town to get here, they took the adjacent highway to reach past the suburban housing district, and then towards the historic older estates that dotted greater Ashford, closer to Salem than Boston. But Myra had so fondly mentioned grandmother Lockwood, and so accurately described her, that the door opened, and there was a white-haired lady of dignified bearing despite her slight stoop, where her dignity did not prevent her from carrying a silver tray of fine china. She smiled as she looked at Joe standing rapt in the study area of the library room, taking it all in. "A guest! And Myra didn't even message beforehand." Myra said she had gone off to find her grandmother, but her grandmother found Joe first instead.

"I'm Evelyn. Sit, sit." She beckoned to the mahogany table, laid the tray down, and began pouring. Myra was right, tea was being offered. "She hardly brings friends home." Evelyn Lockwood was too proper to probe, whether Joe was a schoolmate, a buddy, a boyfriend, or something else. Joe almost wondered if he would be invited to stay for dinner.

Now where was Myra? And what secrets might her own house have kept from her?

She must be out... oh. Hi grandmother. Myra stands in the door to the libary. She didn't expet her grandmother to be home, but apparently they missed eachother in the house.

Introduce me to your friend. Everlyn is dressed in a dark Tai Chi clothing.
I was out back doing my afternoon routine. Perhaps you will join me tomorrow?

I would love that, but Joe and I have some things to discuss. Something is going on at school. And Joe is a classmate.

Very well, I'll leave you to it. Its nice to have some life in the house again.I'm not totally sure about the age of this house. I think part of it is very old, or has been shipped from Europa, or both. Or something like that. I was just a little girl when I heard my dad talk about it. A shadow falls over her face as she misses her father, but she quickly shakes it off.

She turns to one of the shelves and starts to peruse. I have a nagging feeling that I have seen some of those symbols I showed you, somewhere here in this library.

She starts to search. What did you learn today, Joe?

"Ms. Evelyn, you’re most kind. Myra went to look for you. I’m sorry we disturbed your routine, I thought we were being quiet. My name is Joe- oh, hey, Myra."

---

"What’d I learn? Well, I gather the staff aren’t investigating, implying they already know what happened or think they do, but they’re terrible liars, because I called Dr. Veritas on the discrepancy between what she said and what everyone around school was saying, and she was so rattled that she didn’t answer my simple question about whether the school was safe, which should have been a reflexive ‘yes of course’ or ‘why wouldn’t it be’. All she said was that I was jumping to conclusions, but I hadn’t given her any conclusions, just observations about the rumour mill running over possible disappearances. A teacher should know the difference, and normally I’m sure she does."
"But that’s my supposition, and my subject is history not psychology. What’d I learn about Emily; well, I could sense her life force, and her - well, her magick. She not only had - has? - magick, she was using it yesterday; some kind of Spirit power that allowed her to appear in several places. After what Cass said today, it sounds like we’re not the only ones in school with magick. Frankly, I’m wondering if what Emily was doing was some kind of deliberate prank or showing off, and something went wrong; she revealed too much, because it seems like anyone with magick has something to hide; I get the feeling there’s a lot going on not everyone knows about, and nobody hands out explanations until they know you’re already in the secret club; but if you don’t know about it, or know who’s safe to talk to… well, it’s a Catch-22; you can’t find out who’s okay to talk to without talking to them. You’d like to think smart people could do better, and I don’t know how worried to be that apparently they can’t."
"As to us; well, Cass as good as said your family is known for this kind of thing, so I’m assuming that’s connected to your family having a long history in these parts. I apparently have a family connection as well, but because my family isn’t from around here, nobody knows about us. Which might be good, or might not. I -" he pauses, chokes up briefly, then resumes, "I think my mother had magick as well. I’ve had some really odd dreams…"

A twinge went through Myra's heart when she heard Evelyn's warm parting words, about having some life in the house again, for she had largely suppressed how alone she felt in this massive house despite the deep love and companionship grandma Evelyn had surrounded her with. It occurred to her that she had had no guests of her own, perhaps Joe's presence was the start of some openness in her life.

Joe recognised the roomy cut and silken fabric of Evelyn's exercise garment; did she also practise the same kinds of mindful meditative arts that he did as well? Joe joined Myra was she began to look through her extensive shelves, for while it wasn't the same collection he had at home, he seemed to be proficient in perusing through the rows and rows of books. Myra knew what she wanted to dig for - all the information she could gather on the traditions of magick. She had found some such knowledge someone had stashed away in the school library of all places, but here is where she was confident she would find more history, and who better to understand history than Joe?

Myra was also looking for details on that last symbol. To find the dark room with that symbol, she would have to search the campus. But perhaps there was some background on it. Joe wondered if he could find out more about his parents' connection to magic the way Cass seemed so sure Myra's family was, but a library wouldn't be a place to find it. Unless Myra was prepared to go digging into anything her parents might have hidden away from her. For Joe wouldn't have the same chance to do so as he had recently moved to Ashford, unless he confronted his father with these questions. Joe could search up how his dreams work if he wanted. He now had the odd thought: was his enrolment in Ashford High, with all this magical phenomena, incidental? How could he know what his connection to the school was, when it was so hard to figure out who to speak to and trust, and who to be avoided?

Myra and Joe were beginning to realise that they could spend days sifting through the extensive collection. Partly because, for one, Myra's parents had vested a lot of effort into curating this vast library of works and tomes. Their interests were wide-ranging, from hard science and tech all the way to esoterica and kabbalah. What made their search equally fascinating and annoying was the fact that it wasn't about looking for that one book in the form of a musty leather-bound tome written by some self-professed archmage which documented all the traditions of magick. That only happened in fiction. Instead, what both Joe and Myra possessed was the uncanny ability to make connections between the books they were flipping through. A mention of the practices of Hermes Trismegistus, a legendary Hellenistic figure and the mythical founder of Hermeticism found in one volume of encyclopaedia, and then a different reference to Hellenistic mystery religions in the stories of dionysinian and eleusinian hymns needed two intelligent teenage minds to connect together, and then further connect to a third book, and a fourth, and so on, before Myra and Joe could marvel at what the magical Order of Hermes was as part of the Nine Traditions. Similary, with its origins in ancient Sanskrit, and two different translations of the yoga sutras combined with the Dao De Jing led them to understand better what the Akashic way entailed. There was so much to learn and so little time to learn it.

As for the unknown symbol, the closest they could find was an 18th century symbol which contained an impossible amalgamation of various cultural origins from Futhark runes to the eye of Horus to a Sephirot six-pointed star. The common feature was how the circle diagram was a broken one. Perhaps the more modern one Myra saw took inspiration from that, but there was nothing else they could locate in the books.

Myra was amazed by all the connections she and Joe made. The pile of books around them had started to look less like chaos and more like a map, where every thread they tugged on pulled three more into view.

A half-laugh escapes her, but it never fully becomes a laugh. I had no idea my parents knew all this. I thought they were just… academics. Not this.

One page lies open where a paragraph has been underlined years ago in neat pencil. The mark is old, deliberate, and unmistakably intentional. She taps the line once, then meets Joe’s eyes with a sudden, bright intensity. They curated this. This isn’t just a library. It’s a structure.

Another volume is flipped open, and she pushed it toward him. Diagrams of hands and posture fill the pages, surrounded by numbered footnotes, and somewhere near the back a careful hand has cross-referenced three different translations. Her words come fast and exited. Look at this. It’s a guide to hand gestures and movements that facilitate energy flow.

The book turns in her hands so the illustrations face him properly. One stance gets an extra tap of her finger, almost accusatory in its familiarity. Her brow tightens as memory and observation overlap. It resembles T’ai Chi. Not exactly. But the bones of it are there.

Standing carefully, she avoids the scattered books by instinct, nudging a chair aside with her foot to make space. The first position settles into her body with unsettling ease. Her hands float into place with a steadiness she does not remember learning, and her shoulders release like they have been waiting years for permission.

The next movement brings a faint resistance in the air, like water meeting a palm. It isn’t theatrical. It is simply real, and that is worse.

Eyes closed, she repeats the gesture more slowly. Something in her chest loosens, as if a knot has finally been picked apart one patient strand at a time, and even her breathing changes - lower, steadier, less guarded.

When her eyes open again, she swallows. The energy flows a bit better. The movement repeats with a small shift of weight, and the sensation sharpens into a strange clarity that makes her want to laugh and flinch at the same time. Her voice drops. Like removing stones from a riverbed.

A glance toward Joe checks whether he felt it too, whether this is shared reality or private insanity. There’s probably more to it, but that’s what I can feel right now.

Sitting down again feels different now, not like a student hiding in a safe room, but like someone who has realised the room was built for her, and that she has been circling the edges of it her whole life.

The notes they have made are scattered between books and notebooks like breadcrumbs across a dark forest. Hermes Trismegistus. Mystery religions. Dionysian rites. Eleusinian hymns. Each connection like stepping stones across dark water, and each step more certain than the last.

Her fingers find the pendant at her throat without thinking, and her throat tightens around a breath that refuses to settle. The library looks different when she lifts her head again, not changed, but newly legible. Her vision blurs. She blinks hard. The tears come anyway.

When she speaks next, it is not to Joe. It is to the room, to the shelves, to the careful silence her parents left behind. I didn’t know any of this. Why didn’t you tell me?

Her voice cracks, and she hates that it does. Now we’re thrown into a strange new world, and I would really like to talk to you about it.

The back of her hand wipes at her cheek, sharp with embarrassment and sharper with anger that she has a reason to cry. The silence answers the way it always has. The library does what it always does. It holds.

The notes about the unknown symbol drag her attention back down. The broken circle. The impossible amalgamation of origins, runes and Horus and sephirot geometry welded into one sign, as if someone stitched together a dozen traditions and left the seams visible on purpose.

If this is the closest we can find, then whoever made the modern version wanted it to be recognisable.

A fresh page flips over in her notebook, and the pencil starts moving again. The symbol is copied carefully, line by line, as if precision could pin it to the world. Or they wanted it to look like something that already exists… so it could hide in plain sight.

Joe examines the book Myra held out to him with interest, and a critical eye. "This reads like an analysis of martial arts by someone coming from a distinct standpoint, as a mystick or magickal theoretician. Someone who treated the subject as a science, but with an observational approach, more like an eighteenth century natural philosopher than a modern analytical scientist. It’s similar to t’ai chi, but closer I think to some styles of chi gung. My mother-" there’s less of a catch in his voice this time; "my mother taught me something very like this. Chi gung is about energy flow, gathering and channeling it in the body. T’ai chi is more like a manual on how to use the body, like practicing with a tool or an instrument. Some of it involves the application of energy, but almost as a guiding factor, a back-to-first-principles, child’s primer level introduction. Some of what she said suggested a more complete application of the first principles…" he tailed off, in thought.

---

Show me! Myra stands and go through her own movements again. This time she is feeling for shifts in the energy flow.

Calling out to her absent parents made Myra feel less alone. As if they were there to prepare for this eventuality, that Myra would discover her own legacy one day. There were no personal notes in this library, no secret from her parents stashed away in between the pages of a book to give Myra the big reveal, for that would have made it so crystal clear. There were only inferences, but boy were these inferences and connections more and more illuminating, not just for Myra, but for Joe as well. Both of them coming to the same conclusion as they pored over the texts meant that they were right. They did discover the tip of the iceberg, and wealth of knowledge about magic just waiting to be uncovered and learned. But were they supposed to learn how to use their abilities through these books? Almost coincidentally, one of the volumes lying open amongst all the scattered ones on the table and floor was open to page about apprenticeship, learning from a teacher of the right tradition.
But who would teach such a thing to further their education?
The growling of their stomachs reminded Myra and Joe that time had whizzed by as they delved book after book. They hadn't even noticed grandma Evelyn had left a plate of savoury baked puffs next to the tray of tea. The clock showed that it was way past dinner time, but Evelyn's genial permissiveness meant she wasn't the type to summon them to sit down for dinner together. But the hours did past quickly, and they were barely scratching the surface.

Joe, which of these traditions appeals to you?
I feel that the Order of Hermes stings true to me. But there is something familiar about the Sons of Ether.
Perhaps my parents were members of these traditions?

Joe sighs, pausing mid-movement. "I understand that I am heir to the techniques and history of the Akashayana, or the Akashic Brotherhood as it has been known. My mother passed without telling me anything directly, but she evidently prepared. She gave me some preliminary training herself, and she seems to have made other arrangements as well; unfortunately those don’t seem to have been straightforward and for some time I was struggling to decide whether to accept them or not. Frankly, I’ve been considering Occam’s Razor with some desperation, and as of yesterday what seems to be real life suddenly became at least as hard to accept as what up until then I was finding hard to believe in. This," he gestures around him with a waved arm to encompass the preceding thirty hours or so, " suddenly seems more definitely consistent, convincing, and plausible, and therefore likely to be true. Given that, I know some things. My father and my sister are Sleepers, that is, non-mages, and it seems very much that the school operates on the principle of explaining nothing except to those who have Awakened, just as my mother did. Unfortunately it seems that we have all awakened without anyone both familiar to us and in on the great secret close at hand and able to realise what had happened. Result; confusion."
He looks at Myra sympathetically. "So, it looks like your parents were making preparations too, for your sake, in a similar way, without revealing anything; they were planning for the future. If I may ask, and you can say it’s not my business, do you know what happened to your parents?"

A notification alerts Myra to a text.
Hey Myra, is that invite still open? I finished up my project for Jonathan. I can head be over in a bit.

Myra looks up with a fiery passion in her eyes. Like this is a question that she wanted answered and danm the consequences...
And then the passion evaporates. They went missing years ago. I still hope that they will show up, but its just my grandmother and me now.Myra text Kyle back.
That is great Kyle.
Joe and I have made some progress.
Tell you about it when you get here.