Firstly, thank you to those who reached out to me. I appreciate it.

If Neithernor was a place that needed protecting, and the way in had to be kept secret, my father couldn’t just come out and tell me how to find it or get in. He would leave clues. Clues only I (or we) could see.

I am jet lagged and not in a good place right now, but the only way I knew that this was a story my dad already wrote was because I met Colby and he performed that spell on the book. He wouldn’t have done that for anyone else. He was part of the path my father left for me.

So we’re the only ones who already know this story. So we’re the only ones who would know what was different, or added when he told it again. The differences would be where the clues were hidden. This sounds crazy but before I even came up with this idea the parts that were new or different were the parts I’d already written out or quoted last night.

…it was the answer to a question that had haunted him. A question he didn’t have the words to ask. Neithernor became the answer to all the questions. The impossible solution to everything that was wrong. And from that point on he never stopped hearing the call of that forgotten place.

“It was the key to a secret lock inside me. And I gave up everything that mattered to me so I could seek it. So I could knock at its door and be welcomed in.”

Hearing the call. A key to a secret lock. Knock at its door and be welcomed in.

Anybody else wondering why, the further I went down the path, the more I heard those knocking doors? Remember them? And then nothing came of them? I hadn’t heard one in weeks, but the moment my mind hooked onto those little changes, those additions… about keys and locks and calling doors, I felt something. Something in the air. I’m in the brownstone so there’s always drafty windows and strange cold spots, even in summer, but this was different. I’d felt it on the path, in Tel Aviv especially. Something on its way to me. Like tumblers had moved somewhere. Like I’d put a key in a lock and now I just had to figure out how to turn it.

Still, in the midst of all of this, I couldn’t keep my sodding eyes open and fell asleep on the couch in the parlour.

And I dreamed about him. Not him actually, but a story he told me once. Not about the ant and caterpill(ow). About a woman who had to save someone she loved who was lost or trapped in some terrible place. I was her. And I had to gather up pieces of magic armor and weapons. I remembered her name in the dream but a sound woke me up around three in the morning and it disappeared.

Someone was knocking at the brownstone’s front door.

Any other time I would’ve expected it to be Cole.

But I knew the knocking wasn’t him this time.

It was Neithernor, and it had come so I could turn the key.

 

 

I should’ve dramatically ended the post there, but I’ve now spent nearly twelve hours racing around the house knocking back on knocking doors and have come up with absolutely nothing.