Journal
The Monarch Papers is a series of journals written by Sullivan Green. There are three known volumes.
Description
The Monarch Papers are magimystical journals penned by Sullivan Green, some forty years before his daughter Deirdre’s arrival in New York City. The books contain a record of Sullivan’s journey of magiqal discovery, following the various paths which ultimately helped him discover the world of magiq.
In “In Air,” Sullivan describes the three paths he had taken to try to reach a state of magimystic enlightenment. Two groups, both of whom knew that magiq had been stripped from the world, had set paths so that anyone with enough drive to seek the truth about magiq could follow them. However, after failing to find what he sought by following either of the two paths, he made his own. According to Sullivan:
“…at the end of both roads is nothing but silence and ruin. Roads that, at one time in history, were walked by those who sought the truth. But when I walked them I found those who built them were no longer waiting at the end. And hadn’t been for quite some time. It wasn’t until years later that I found what I believe to be the truth and now I leave it safe at the end of this new road. For you.”
History
Volume One
Volume One was sent to Deirdre by Aunt Monica, as described in the blog post “What to Do.” The journal had been hidden in Monica’s attic until then, when Deirdre asked her if she remembered anything about Sullivan.
During Phase Two, Deirdre was unable to make out the writing in the journal, seeing only what she described in the post “Happy Feelings” as ‘the chaos of a fractured mind.’ The journal initially contained map points leading to Bernard Sleigh’s Fairyland, as well as images of the psyche, and an animal story used to navigate the map.
During Phase Three, Deirdre was finally able to read the full contents of the journal. In the journal, Sullivan revealed the truth of his travels to Deirdre, stating that he was following a hundreds-of-years-old journey, tracking down pieces of art that would lead to a magimystic truth. Deirdre began following this trail as well, and as she traveled Sullivan’s path, she found that the revelation of clues also depended on her emotional state.
Volume Two
The status of Volume Two is currently unknown.
Volume Three
Volume Three of the Monarch Papers was stolen from Sullivan’s safety deposit box by The Cagliostro and sent to his apprentice, Lauren Ellsworth, as a test of her magimystic ability. Parts of the journal would reveal themselves if certain requirements related to time and temperature were satisfied, and as Lauren unlocked them, she uploaded them onto the Cagliostro’s databases. The journal ultimately led to the discovery of the Ackerly Green Book, Seven Cradle Songs, and included a note to reverse the spell that had hidden Deirdre from magiq.
The Monarch Papers: Neithernor
In Phase Four, Deirdre discovered an additional secret unnumbered volume of The Monarch Papers at the home of Orvin Wallace, Sullivan’s attorney. This volume revealed that Sullivan was in fact still alive. As Deirdre explained, after talking to Orvin Wallace:
My father didn’t die last year. The Storm had seen how powerful he’d become when it touched him. And the Silver wanted something in 1898. Something equally powerful. The day he escaped the palace of doors and the Storm touched him, he caught a glimpse of where it planned to send him. It was a blessing and a curse. The only way he and the council knew their plan would succeed is if they had someone helping it along throughout time. So he decided then that instead of waiting to die in the park, hiding from the world, hoping this plan would work, he would let the Storm take him, and ensure the plan would work.
After this, Sullivan went on an indefinite journal into Neithernor, slowly remembering who he was in the process. His current location is unknown.
It was later revealed that parts of the pages found in Fragment Thirteen were journal entries written by a stormswept Sullivan:
I wake in the room of a hospital. Gray buildings loom outside the grime-stained window. I am in the city again. How? What do I last remember? Sand. Ships half-buried in it, bows pointing to the silver sun. A hand, outstretched, calling for me. A welcome. I had walked so far into those woods that I found the sea. A strange green sea where all manner of mast and man had washed ashore. People dressed in bygone fashions and others wearing clothes from what must have been times yet to come. A shore where time was as ever-changing as the great great sea itself. And then a voice called to me. From the dark world I left. How had they found me? Had I not wandered far enough into my new world. They called me by my name.
A name I thought I’d left in the dead gray city along with all the memories of my life before wonder. I stepped into the sand but felt a hand on my shoulder. And somehow the sea and the shore of times intermixed and began to fade away. As if someone had drawn a curtain down over it. A curtain painted with the mundane world I thought I had escaped.A girl found me walking in a dry river bed, unable to hear or see her. She went to the farmer who employed me. In my cabin they found the name of a doctor in New York City whose care I had been in before I ventured to the green world, and then beyond. The doctor who listened to my fractured recollections. Of other worlds. And other lives. The doctor knew my name. He’d been the one who drew me back from what he tried to explain were nothing more than imaginings. That all I had seen and heard, tasted, and touched, had been inside my sundered mind.
I fought with all my will against that thought. It could not have been a dream. I had found a world so wondrous it was beyond any man’s ability to conjure, least of all mine. But his insistence worked its way in me and now I am here in the city again. Withered. The doctor speaks my name as if it were an anchor to keep me from drifting away again. He has cursed me. I can not see the wondrous world. Only gray. I ask to be left alone. To forget. To sleep until I do not wake again, because I have remembered something. I’ve remembered that this place holds untold loss for me. A loss so profound that I beg sleep to sweep me away.
But this morning the doctor brings me a box. Inside is what I left behind when I first escaped the city. He tells me I have a life that is worth fighting to find again. My purpose is to discover what happened, what split me, and how to mend myself once again.
Inside, a flannel shirt and billfold. Trousers made of strange material. He remarks that the shoes are odd, with soles like rubber, possibly fashioned in another country. Perhaps I am from another land, he wonders. I nod. But as I hold all the things I left behind, my clothing, my shoes, my watch, a new truth behind to grow inside my breast. I am here in the gray but my vision has opened something inside me. I can see now that my heart has drifted on the great green sea of time. I don’t belong here, as I have long suspected. Who I am and what I am here to do begin to crash against me all at once. I have somehow drifted onto the edge of another era with magic in my heart and a great purpose only now awakening, pulling me toward shore. Not another land, my doctor. I have sailed here from another time.