Mr. Wideawake is the nickname for the modern day Collector.
Personality
Mr. Wideawake is a human member of Monarch’s Mountain. Because all Collectors are meant to stay anonymous until after their death, Mr. Wideawake adopts the form of a human-sized Sooty Tern bird in a three-piece suit to maintain his secret identity.
Phase Four
Mr. Wideawake played a key role in revealing the process by which magiq has been mostly erased from the world. Namely, he revealed that the time in which magiq existed was known as The Book of the Wild. On the other hand, the time in which we were living during the events of The Monarch Papers is known as The Book of Kings. The following is the explanation, as given to Deirdre:
I asked what the “The Book of The Wild” meant and he said it’s what The Monarchs call the time before everything changed. He said “Someone, we don’t know who, changed the Book of The Wild and in its place was this world, this time.” They call now “The Book of Kings.”
I tried to get my head around the fact that we’re living in an alternate timeline from an original timeline that had magiq in it but he said it wasn’t as simple as that. It was magiq after all. He asked me to imagine a book. And then someone decided to edit that book. To remove something fundamental. Stories would have to be changed, characters rewritten, outcomes altered. And the ripples of all those changes would extend into the future chapters and the past. And it would be impossible to catch all the hanging threads. Scattered memories would be missed… and wells. Wells are like “hidden themes that remain, despite the narrative being altered.”
So someone edited out magiq, I said. And he said “No. We believe someone edited out the Briar Books and all magiq followed after.”