OH MY GOD I JUST GOT VISITED BY A HAUNTED FREAKIN DOLL
It whispered this message…and then it crawled under my bed 
:
Well, I now know what a megatherium is because I’ve had one sleeping in my living room for the past five days. So I’ve had time to put my thoughts together and do as much legwork as I can before the big guy wakes up.
I lost access to the forum sometime around late spring, or early summer. I don’t know exactly when, because I wasn’t checking it that often. I hope you’ll forgive me that. Sebastian and I had a lot of lost time to make up for, and I wanted every waking moment spent with him, his wife, and my beautiful grandkids. Also, I thought things were good so I wasn’t too worried.
But eventually, I knew something was off. Then I found that the forum was gone. My lone contact in the Low vanished. Saberlane and Catherine stopped responding to my emails (I even tried calling, though Sabes has never once picked up his phone, so that wasn’t out of the ordinary). I haven’t been able to reach Jeremy, Port, or Alison either. And so I’ve been stuck between having everything I’ve wanted for the past three decades and losing the solid life I made over the past five years.
I have been looking for you this whole time, but I’ll be honest, there was this nagging feeling in the back of my mind that that this was the '94s all over again. You’d moved on, or needed to cut contact with those on the outside of your inner circle, and I hadn’t made the cut. I struggled, I tried to make a case of it, as always, but things have changed since the events in The Monarch Papers went public. People who know things don’t talk like they used to talk. People who don’t believe in magic think TMP was fiction, and many who do believe think we were crazy, attention-seeking, or a menace for publishing what happened.
Magic is also the one thing Seb and I can’t talk about. It’s the thing that broke our family apart. He’s tried to be patient, and I’ve tried to stay mum, chalking it all up to magic being a young person’s game, and I just needed to enjoy grandfatherdom.
But you know me.
So that’s the basic catch up. But the night before the big guy showed up in my living room (He likes cookies. I leave them out, and he eats them in the middle of the night. Like a smelly, snoring Santa), I had a dream. About snow and cold and magic.
And guess who was in it.
Lauren (Cagliostro) Ellsworth.
We were in the Cagliostro’s gutted loft together. The windows and exterior walls had caved in, and there were snow drifts all around us. She told me to pull the walls apart, to look for the artifacts built into them. Objects with power. So I did. At some point, she mentioned another wall, one we couldn’t tear down, but that we needed all the power we could find to see through the cracks.
The wall in front of me crumbled and inside was a giant clock, ticking so loudly I could barely hear her say that time was running out. I recognized the clock immediately. It was the one in the middle of Grand Central Station.
Where I first saw her turn to snow.
I woke up, cold, and all morning I felt like I had to go back to Grand Central. So I did. And at the spot where Lauren disappeared, an older woman was waiting for me. A woman that was speaking on behalf of Lauren.
We covered a lot of ground, and I’ll fill you in later, but the gist is that Lauren has withdrawn from the world. So she sent an emissary in her place, the woman, who I assume Lauren was controlling or at least magimystically communicating through. Lauren’s in some sort of incubation, where her powers are actually making her more vulnerable now, not stronger. Her telemancy has grown exponentially, and she is overwhelmed with millions, maybe billions of thoughts, including those of previous Cagliostro iterations. She’s hiding. Or was, until something tried to breach her metaphorical cocoon. Her line of defense against the world.
I’m assuming that was you. I mean, I’m not mad. I’d try for Lauren first, too. However you did it, it was good you did because you briefly got her attention. For a moment, she could sense what she calls "a wall in the world.” She says she can’t see through it, or around it, and can’t hear anything inside its boundaries. It’s cutting off a part of the world from her, from everything. And I’m guessing you’re inside it? She said that it’s always growing, building itself, always making sure that whatever’s inside it can’t be reached, or can’t reach out, though you somehow managed to send a giant sloth through with a letter. But—
She says there is one way in. She can sense it, but can’t see it. A sort of hidden door. But the door itself is determining what can and can’t pass through, and its power is immense. To find the door, which might help us figure out how to break in, or out, we need to “shine a light bright enough to find the cracks in the wall," a metaphorical light (or maybe literal, we never know with magic) that might outline the hidden door. We can try from here, on the outside, but we don’t know exactly where we’re looking. The wall surrounds you, she says it’s everywhere you look, so our best bet to find the door is for you to try and “shine the light” from the inside.
So… Got all that? It’s left me pretty much out of the picture with nothing to do but try and reach out to anyone I could. Which I’d already been trying to do this past year to no avail. I tried to go to the Ackerly Green office again, but basically couldn’t find it. I kept getting lost. So… magic.
Worried about our friends, I drove out to where Alison, Port, and Jeremy live now (Seb reluctantly kept an eye on the big guy.) Nothing obviously magimystic was happening to hide them as far as I could see. They were just flat out gone. And it looked like they packed up and bailed in a hurry. So I’m assuming they’re on this side of the wall, not yours. Not sure what it all means, definitely has me worried, and I’m telling you because you said you’ve been working with a group called “searchers"?
Well, Port had covered a wall of her room with drawings of a mountain and a big old building, like a castle or a church, and she’d written “Search for Magiq" on every one of them.
I’m glad you’re alive, and wondering what the hell you’ve all gotten yourselves into this time.
Seriously though, I’m glad you’re all okay. Don’t worry, whatever this is, we’ll figure it out and fix it.