Hello Mountaineers,
I know I am new, and practically a stranger, but I have the most amazing news to share with you—Saberlane is back! It’s more complicated than that, of course. Isn’t it always? He can only be here, with his family, during the three months of the year when magiq ebbs. Remember when Reader was able to see the forum again and posted those excerpts from The Forest of Darkening Glass? Some of the Mounties found a secret code in Fletcher Dawson’s website, and hidden in the text from FoDG was a poem.
Writing from my lonely tower
Unmoored from history
I shed the fear of passing hour
For time cannot find me
I am unlocked, I am unwound
Not pinned to any Age
I see all time as chapters bound
And turn them like a page
It’s how I met the hawkeyed man
Where none of us belonged
And helped him make a child a fan
To right what had been wronged
I choose to not sit idly
A gudgeon of the fates
I edit time and history
To aid the eighteen gates
But when the autumn winds call me
And magic falls asleep
Then I return posthumously
The only time I keep
To my own chapter I’m rebound
And all that I hold dear
And what was lost is now refound
And will be every year
But if you wonder where I’ve gone
Or why I lack a tomb
And why I leave at Imbolc’s dawn
You have my nom de plume
We struggled with the nom de plume angle for some time. The name Sullivan means “hawk-eyed” or “dark-eyed,” so Sullivan Green is likely the hawkeyed man from the second stanza. And the child fan could be Brandon Lachmann (or someone else, if you’ve finished reading the Book of Briars.) Then, @Augustus_Octavian discovered that Dawson means “son of David” and @Robert told us that Saberlane is the son of David Bernstein! That’s when we heard from him. Saberlane—the man out of time who sees visions of the future and the past—has been Fletcher Dawson all along! Like a fletcher, he has been creating arrows through all of history to point the Mountaineers on the path they should follow. Well, he describes it as “planting seeds to help [the Mountaineers] grow in both power and comprehension, so they might learn the forgotten laws of magic—and the secret language at its heart.” He still exists, he is still helping us, and–sometimes–he can still live his life with his children, and husband, and friends.