The Search For Magiq

By Ackerly Green Publishing

So much of magic is still a mystery to the Mountaineers, but there’s one thing they know for certain: What little is left of magic is running out. 

It’s been over a year since they’ve heard from any of their friends from The Monarch Papers — Martin Rank, Deirdre Green, even the old Basecamp leaders, like Ascender, Endri, and Eaves. Despite the fact that new recruits are pouring into the forum every day, it seems like the Mountaineers are the last bastion of magimystic knowledge in this world.

That is, until, a new recruit with connections to the Low finds a mysterious social media campaign called “Search for Magiq.” With time running out, and the magimystic walls hiding them from the world steadily closing in, the Mountaineers take their chances and join the cause. 

Their search leads them to the Sanctuary, a secret group of adepts and allies that include old faces and new, working together to protect those affected by magic from a threat once thought vanquished. The Silver are back and desperate to possess all that remains of magic.

Will the Mountaineers be able to see the Sanctuary to safety before the Silver attack? And what will be lost and found again when the Book of Kings closes forever, and the Book of Briars is born at last?

The follow-up to the narrative events of The Ackerly Green Secret Society, The Search for Magiq guides readers into a new age of spellbinding Briarverse adventures, setting the stage for C.J. Bernstein’s long-awaited novel, The Book of Briars.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ackerly Green Publishing
• Release date: Sep 23, 2020
• ISBN: 9781735791203

Book preview

The Search For Magiq

The Search For Magiq

March 2019 – February 2020

C.J. Bernstein

Adapted for print by

Catherine Thoms

Ackerly Green Publishing

Copyright © 2020 by Ackerly Green Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed Attention: Permissions Coordinator, at the address below.

Ackerly Green Publishing

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Ordering Information:

Quantity sales. Special discounts are available on quantity purchases by corporations, associations, and others. For details, contact the publisher at the address above.

Cover Design: Micaela Alcaino

Publisher: Ackerly Green Publishing, LLC

Editor: Bethany Bryan

ISBN: 978-1-7357912-0-3

1. Fantasy - Contemporary 2. Dark Fantasy 3. Epistolary

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

Contents

Preface

1. The 30-Day Spell

2. The Neithercouriers

3. A Wall In The World

4. The Cataclysm

5. Peering Arts

6. Elemental Disruption

7. The Wellspring

An Excerpt from the next book in the series:

1

About C.J. Bernstein

Preface

The following post, briefly mentioned in the prior adaptation of Ackerly Green’s Secret Society, appeared on the forum while the Mountaineers were still working to separate the minds of Saberlane and the Neithernorian ghost affectionately dubbed Woolie. While narratively unrelated, the following events ran parallel to those of the Secret Society throughout the month of April until the Secret Society finally concluded on April 18, 2019, with the discovery of the aliquary Avis Green left for us.

Unrelated these stories may be, but irrelevant they are not. What follows here is a continuation of the Mountaineers’ quest for truth and understanding, about magiq, the world as we know it, and those working to shape our collective future. This chapter of their pursuit has been officially titled The Search for Magiq, inspired by the extraordinary and catalyzing events detailed below, which have been compiled and consolidated here for your convenience.

1

The 30-Day Spell

SpiritSeer: March 29, 2019, 1:00 PM

Hey, Mounties! Sorry to bother, but by chance were you the ones who put up a 30 Day Spell thing that was on Instagram 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 Instagram 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 Instagram 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 FB 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 Instagram 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 Instagram 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.

2

The Neithercouriers

Saberlane launched the discussion with the most pressing question that had come of @searchformagiq’s final post: If they’re here, in this age, with us, then what is this ‘leaden veil’ that they keep talking about? The one that hides us from the world?

If the Mountaineers had somehow been hidden, it would explain a lot. It would certainly explain why the Low had begun having trouble finding them, or why nobody involved in the events of The Monarch Papers had reached out in nearly a year. Not Marty, not AlisonB, nor Cole, nor Deirdre. The more they thought about it, the more likely that explanation seemed. But how, and why, were still the main questions at hand. And if the Mountaineers were being hidden, then how was it possible that new recruits were starting to come in droves, and had been for the entire month?

Could the ‘leaden veil’ be the remnants of what is separating us living in the Book of Kings from those co-conterminously in the Book of Briars? Augo wondered. It seems like his Herald can peer through. Unless there’s something else. What keeps the Low from interacting with us? Could that be a possibility?

Though Spirit claimed that her connection to the Low had dwindled down to just one contact, she promised to ask about everything: Heralds, veils, and the Neithercouriers. In the meantime, the Mountaineers started trying to put the pieces together and make sense of the mess they had been dropped into.

Viviane noted the similarity between the way the strange messenger spoke of the leaden veil and the leaden aprons worn to protect from radiation during medical treatments like x-rays. I wonder if it’s something like that, she proposed, "where most normal means of reaching us can’t get in, but you can try to find other methods that can pass through that barrier.

There were two things that everyone could agree on. One, was that the Neithercouriers, whatever they were, almost certainly had something to do with Neithernor. And the second was best said by MissEvans: "We started this new age in light,