gavrielscuppies

[gavrielscuppies]

Emma To Jem

Dear Jem,

I feel bad writing to you about this out of the blue, but you said it was okay to get in touch with you anytime for advice. And you always give good advice, but I can’t help feeling like beyond that, maybe you might have some familiarity here that could be helpful?

So, as you know, Julian and I have taken on the gigantic task of renovating Blackthorn Hall. AND, you probably are totally unsurprised to hear, we found a ghost. (I say this because everyone else who was around back when this house was being taken care of, are also not surprised there’s a ghost.)

Good news: ghost is not unfriendly (or at least not violent). He’s just looking for the “silver band” that binds him. Not unusual, lots of ghosts are bound to an earthly object.

Bad news: ghost can’t be identified as a specific person, so could be pretending to not be violent. Also, “silver band” could be any of a thousand things.

I suppose we can just put aside anything we find that might be what he’s looking for, but that seems pretty unlikely to work. (After all, he hasn’t found the “silver band” in the house and he’s been haunting it for however long.)

We did get one direct clue from the ghost. He likes to communicate by scrawling in dust on the floor, and his last message told us to Find the Devil Tavern. Ok. A little research turns up that it’s a Downworlder speakeasy, heavily glamoured, that’s been around for hundreds of years, in London’s Old City. (It was apparently a real tavern once, and Samuel Johnson had a drinking club there. Wild times, I gather.) Jules looked it up and apparently it’s still in operation. It’s not far from the Institute, actually, though whether that has to do with the ghost or is just a coincidence we don’t know.

Anyway, Julian and I went to check out the place. It’s a glamoured pub, of course. From the outside you pretty much just see a bank and one of those blue plaques they put on historical sites.

It was clear the mundanes walking by couldn’t see the entrance. But we could, of course. So we went in.

Inside, it’s a pretty normal pub, it turns out, though they make you go through a whole rigamarole to get in, they’re really leaning into the speakeasy thing. You actually now have to go into the mundane bank, which must think it has the weirdest clientele of any bank branch in England. You have to mention “the Devil” to the teller, who then gives you a key made of salt that opens a panel in the lift that reveals a button with little devil horns on it. Which takes you down to the pub. (The key disintegrates when you use it, obviously.) I have no idea what happens when some random mundane says, “what the devil happened to my money,” or something.

Anyway, that all sounds very complicated but in practice it was easy enough; rather than trying for some complicated password Julian only said casually, “I’m here for the Devil,” and the teller handed him the key. She barely even looked interested, she was doing a sudoku on her phone or something and just kind of handed the key over from a tray of them. Maybe Londoners just don’t blink at bizarre very old London stuff.

We came in and looked around and then eventually the barman asked if we wanted anything and we left. They obviously recognized us as Shadowhunters and were not super-pleased to see us. But in that short visit we didn’t see anything in plain view that had anything to do with a silver band, or the house in Chiswick, or the Blackthorns and Lightwoods who lived there. The place could be any ancient London pub, very old, dark wood, stained glass, and just an overwhelming crowd of drunk Downworlders. We had, it seems, interrupted a retirement party for one of their regulars, a kelpie. I know what you’re going to ask, and yes, the kelpie was in a big tub of water. His name was Pickles—I know!—and he kept yelling about how he was “starting a new life under the sea.” So of course they thought we were basically the cops come to bust up their party, and didn’t want us there. But I don’t know what we could have done even if we stayed. We’d been hoping we’d see the place and it would just spark some kind of ideas about silver bands and the like, but — no dice.

So I thought, since you and Tessa were both around in the earlier better days of Blackthorn Hall, once Lightwood House—does the Devil Tavern ring any bells for you? Can you think of any connection between this random Downworlder pub and the people who lived in the house in Chiswick? If not, no worries, but I thought I would at least ask. If you have any thoughts about the identity of our ghost, based on the Devil Tavern thing or anything else I’ve said, please get in touch and let us know! Cleaning out the house definitely includes cleaning out the ghosts, but also, you know, it feels like the right thing to do to help him out if we can.

My love to Tessa and Kit and Mina, and love from us here!

Emma

[gavrielscuppies]

Emma To Bruce

Dear Bruce,

I woke up this morning to find it was an improbably beautiful day with bright blue skies and those cute little white scudding clouds. “All right,” I thought. “There is no way I am spending this gorgeous day in wonderful London inside this falling-down house, scrubbing the floors and brooding about ghosts. The question: how to convince Julian that we should go out and have fun?”

I marched upstairs and found Julian drinking coffee in the kitchen. I said, “Jules. You know that thing you want me to do, that I’ve been refusing to do? If you come out and have a good time with me today in London, I’ll do it.”

A big grin spread over his face. He said, “OKAY!” In fact, he said it as he was already running out the door. I had to get him to come back for a jacket.

Bruce, we had an absolutely great time in London. We took a boat ride down the Thames. We went to a costume shop. We saw the Tower and went to Fortnum and Mason’s and had tea. Julian ate all my cucumber sandwiches because I hate them. We went on the London Eye, which is like a more spectacular version of the Ferris wheel on the Santa Monica Pier. Demons did not attack this time, and Julian booked a whole pod so that we could snuggle and cuddle.

In the middle of the snuggling and cuddling, Julian stopped and stared into my eyes with an intense look. I could tell he had something to ask me, and for a moment I thought—well, it doesn’t matter what I thought.

“Emma,” he said, “what would you think about moving to London with me?”

I said, “What do you mean? We’re already here.”

He explained that he was thinking, if we got Blackthorn Hall all fixed up, we could live in it until Dru or Ty or Tavvy (or all three of them) grow up and want to move there. He explained that Helen and Aline were doing a great job running the LA Institute and that they don’t really need us. Besides, they’re thinking of starting a family soon so maybe they don’t want so many people running around the Institute. I said, “But I thought you liked Los Angeles, and practically everyone we know is there.” He pointed out that that wasn’t totally true. In London, we’d be closer to Ty, and pretty much the same distance from the east coast, where Dru is, and of course Mark and Cristina are in New York half the time, too. I think he could tell that I wasn’t sure what to say, because he added, “It’s really about us having a home, one that we make together. Being grown up, and having a grown up kind of life.”

I joked around, saying we were still pretty young, and he said, “I know that most people who get together when they’re teenagers break up. They get older and they change. I just want us to go through the important things together, so we change together. Does that make sense?”

I told him it did though I was pretty freaked out he even mentioned BREAKING UP as a concept. So I kissed him, which distracted us both, and when our pod came to a stop on the ground everyone cheered and whistled. The English are more lustful than I had previously suspected.

I was exhausted by the time we got home and discovered that our ghost friend had been active in our absence. In the dust on the dining room floor were written the words

FIND THE DEVIL TAVERN

Now what on earth does that mean? Though honestly, we were both kind of pleased to see the message. At least it’s a clue so that we can begin to unravel the mystery of our ghost and his silver band.

PS Bruce, I know you’re dying to find out what it was that Julian wanted me to let him do that I have been refusing to do. Remember when I said we went to a costume shop? Well, apparently Dru made Julian watch The Hunger Games with her the last time we were home, and he really really wanted to paint me like this.

The things we do for love.

—Emma

[gavrielscuppies]

Magnus to Alec

Dear Alec,

Before anything else, I just want to mention once again that you are by far the handsomest man I have ever met, with the most beautiful blue eyes, and what I love most about you, among so, so many other features, is that you are a man of incalculable understanding, patience, and forgiveness.

Yes, this is our vacation. Yes, you and the kids are lounging on the soft white sands of St Barths, as is good and right. Yes, I have had to dash to London on urgent business involving Blackthorns. Yes, I have been receiving your many supportive texts, accompanied by your many photos in which you look angry while holding umbrella drinks.

No, I will not be back today. You must imagine me saying this with the heaviest of sighs and the most forlorn look. I need one more day. Blackthorn Hall is haunted—which I could have told anyone who had bothered to ask, I’ve never known a more obviously haunted place in my life—and none of the little Blackthorns (who I suppose are no longer quite as little as all that) have had to deal with this kind of ghostiness before.

So again, let me commend you for your forbearance in this time of trial. That is not sarcasm, just formal! I really mean it!

Love you, Alec. See you tomorrow night. The next morning at the absolute latest -

To the Greatest Man Who Has Ever Or Will Ever Live,

It will be tomorrow morning. I was meaning to depart tonight, but it is now very, very late, and I have had no small amount of wine, and these are not the conditions by which I would feel quite safe opening a Portal. It will not do me any good to return to St Barth if I show up on top of the Gustavia Lighthouse.

So since I cannot yet sleep, but must, let me quickly fill you in.

The Blackthorns are fixing up Blackthorn Hall—fancy that—and while I understand they are now properly adults, they are still young enough to use a hundred year old Ouija board they found hidden in the walls. Didn’t have a planchette? Not a problem, we will just make one out of scrap without reference to the wood or the ley-lines or any of the— Sorry. I couldn’t help it, it’s such the Shadowhunter stereotype. Leap before you look. In fact, just leap. Leap whenever and wherever.

As it turns out (spoiler alert!) the spirit of the house—at least the restless one—means no apparent harm and is just your standard everyday “ghost looking for its missing bauble to move on” situation, as you’ll see. But I was more alarmed for it being the house in Chiswick. Many generations of Lightwoods lived in it over many years, and there always seemed a dark shadow over the place. In the mid-19th it was the home of, I’m sorry to say, a very bad Lightwood, definitely one of the worst Lightwoods, and after that, well, its fall from grace was precipitous. I cannot say from what time period this ghost might date, but given its reaction to the name “Blackthorn”, I had my worries.

Anyway, by the time I got to the house, Julian and Emma had managed to cause the Ouija board to, you know, magically shatter into a dozen pieces. I magicked it back—note for future reference, easier to magically repair something that was magically broken in the first place rather than with, say, a hammer—and produced a makeshift but actually calibrated and warded planchette. And burned their planchette in a fire. Outside.

It was quick enough at that point to contact the presence in the house, who was indistinct, probably from being alone for the past hundred-odd years. Let me tell you, Alec love, I was worried then. I was worried that this ghost was someone I knew. Someone I cared about, once. It probably isn’t—most of them would have no reason to be ghosts at all, much less ghosts stuck here—but once the thought occurred to me, I couldn’t put it aside. I tried to ask but you know how ghosts are. “I do not now know you,” it said. Great. But did you know me when you were alive? Just “I do not now know you.”

Anyway the thing was peaceful enough. We finally got around to the topic of why he is a ghost—we got enough of a spoken voice to know the voice is male, at least. He spoke aloud, and firmly. I am bound here by a silver band, he said.

Whether this silver band is a ring, a bracelet, a handcuff, the concept of “the ties that bind,” or a group of robot musicians, I have no idea. But it’s normal enough for a ghost to be bound by an object and to be looking for the thing that binds them. I honestly didn’t get a negative vibe from the guy. I’m… let’s say ninety percent sure that it’s not the aforementioned Bad Lightwood, at least. I told Julian and Emma there was no harm in their keeping an eye out for a silver band during their cleanup of the house, but not to worry themselves sick over it. This felt like wise advice at the time, although we had all had quite a bit of wine at that point.

The wine was in fact drunk continually throughout the evening, as there are some salvageable bottles from the cellar—rather amazingly, although I don’t know, maybe Shadowhunters have wine preservation runes somewhere near the back of the Gray Book. And drinking red wine while talking to a ghost just seemed, I don’t know, the right pairing? But of course now I have a splitting headache from a combination of sulfites and light necromancy. I am going to put myself to long-overdue sleep, and then tomorrow at six in the morning your time please tell le garçon I would like waiting for me a café allongé, very hot and a sidecar, very cold. I will then entertain the children for the rest of the day while you, my love, my all, take a nap and join us whenever you please.

With all my love, all my kissin’, you don’t know what you been missin’,

M.

[gavrielscuppies]

Now with Azazel!

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Diana Wrayburn from #thedarkartifices drawn by Cassandra Jean. To my trans readers: you are wonderful, you are beautiful, you are loved, you are valid, you are extraordinary. No one should tell you otherwise.

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Belphegor and Leviathan. The creepier looking Princes of Hell...

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Not technically a prince of Hell but worth a mention....

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SoBH Ghost = Andrew Blackthorn

Maybe the ghost is Andrew Blackthorn because it was mentioned in TftSA that Lady Nerissa gave him a silver choker. It was broken by Arthur in Faerie but we didnt know if they brought it back to the mortal world. Also, it is not out of possibility that Andrew wonders or questions Nerissa's deceitful truth that she ensorcelled him to love her and maybe that is why he was "bound" metaphorically to the "silver band" (the choker), like it's one of his biggest "what if" or regrets in life - not knowing if Nerissa lied or if he really did love her. Like he can't pass to the afterlife if he didn't know the truth.

#sobh #sobh theories #secrets of blackthorn hall #tsc #tsc theories

[gavrielscuppies]

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A brand new flower card from CASSANDRA JEAN! THE MOSTEST ADORABLE MINA CARSTAIRS. She is just so cute, I am dead.

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Every single postcard Cassandra Jean did for the release of Chain of Iron. If you've read the book, you should be able to identify all the scenes — if not, something to look forward to! (Also, click any image to make it bigger.)

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A tale of two kelpies . . .

@cassandra and I got to talking today about various flower cards, and how it was funny that there was a flower that meant "spleen" (anger.) She asked about the kelpie from Queen of Air and Darkness. I explained:

Me: He's much angrier than Pickles. His name is Jarog the Enraged, and he stole Pickles' rightful place as heir to the kelpie throne. That's why Pickles drinks.

Cassandra Jean: I must illustrate this kelpie drama!

So here you have it: Pickles and his nemesis, Jarog. Will Claribella's love save Pickles from a kelpie war? Will Jarog fall in love with Claribella, thus precipitating a kelpie love triangle? Who can say?

[gavrielscuppies]

Julian to Magnus

Hi Magnus,

So I know you told me only to get in touch for a “real emergency,” and I think you might have already left for vacation. But we’ve got some ghost trouble here at Chiswick House and we could use a little advice. Just in writing! No need to interrupt your time away! Unless, um, you think it really is an emergency.

Chiswick House is in awful shape in general, so it’s hard to know what’s a real problem and what’s just a hundred years of neglect. Other than one small area nobody’s touched the place since, it seems, the time of Tatiana Blackthorn.

We have some garden gnomes here doing the structural repairs and the big stuff, masonry and framing and so on. I mean, they’re not actually garden gnomes, I think they’re brownies, but they have the big pointy hats and the beards and everything. They’ve been moving pretty slowly, but recently Kieran was here and he had a talk with the foreman (this guy named Round Tom who is not even all that round) and since then things have sped up a lot. And there is a lot less complaining about the work conditions, and a lot less disappearing for the day if the tea runs out for more than five minutes. On the other hand, they’ve started leaving little offerings around intended for “the Un-Seel Laird,” which I gather is Kieran. Not anything Kieran would want, I don’t think. A lot of acorns and pretty rocks, mostly? And the occasional portrait of Kieran in chalk, which let me tell you, it’s a good thing they’re competent at construction because their portraiture could use some work. We’ve been keeping all the stuff in a box for him just in case.

I’m rambling, sorry. It’s just us rattling around in this giant ruin and all we want is for someone to listen to our dull stories about home renovation. But what I actually want to tell you about is the ghost.

I’m sure there are dozens of random spirits going back centuries that have some kind of faint presence in the house—Round Tom hinted as much to me—but there’s definitely some specific one that is actively haunting the place. We’ve had some poltergeist-y stuff. Mostly harmless pranks: vases overturned, drinks spilled, music faintly playing in the distance but originating from nowhere, weird hot spots, weird cold spots, doors slamming, doors closing very slowly on their own. To clarify, I do NOT mean poltergeist as in the movie Dru made me watch. No one has been sucked into evil dimensions or levitated (yet!). Still, it seems like we ought to try to get out ahead of this, so Emma and I have been trying to communicate with the presence directly. Whoever it is, they haven’t responded to us speaking to them, and it’s starting to feel silly to constantly talk in a friendly voice to nobody, like we have an imaginary friend. All that happens is the next morning someone has stacked all the gnomes’ hats into a hat tower and we have to convince the gnomes it wasn’t us.

Lest you think we haven’t tried smarter things than just yelling “Here ghostie ghostie ghostie,” Tiberius sent us a device he’s been working on, like a Sensor for ghosts. I spent some time walking the halls and eventually found a spot along some random corridor where the Sensor went crazy. I busted the wall open with a sledgehammer—somehow I feel like you would approve, although the gnomes did not—and behind the plaster, wedged between two of the beams, was a Ouija board that must go back to at least Tatiana’s time, if not before. There was no planchette, so we made our own out of scrap wood and furniture tacks. Maybe there was something bad about using that instead of something that went with the Ouija board, I don’t know how it works, but in any event, we tried the board and it went really badly.

We tried to do things officially—Emma and I waited until midnight, we got dressed up nicely, and we went down into the cellar. (There are a bunch of rooms down there that are highly spooky and look like they’ve been used for ghost-ish business in the past.) We extinguished witchlights (no electricity down there any more than it’s anywhere else), lit lots of candles. Ghosts love candles, right? We had a bolt of black silk to sit on that Emma found in a trunk somewhere, and we sat on either side of the board and both put our hands on the planchette.

Us: HELLO

Nothing.

Us: WEMEANNOHARM

The candles guttered, but most of the windows in the room are smashed, so with the usual draft from outside I’m not sure we can count that as a response.

Us: WHATISYOURNAME

We heard a scratching sound coming from one of the walls, and we opened up that wall in great excitement, but it turned out to be a badger. Actually, it was a mother badgers and some badger cubs, which was very cute until the mother starting trying to kill us. So we had to interrupt and go get the gnomes to help us and they relocated the badger family to a glade of some kind. (They also issued us a bill for “badger decampment.”)

This was all very disappointing. Emma said that maybe it was rude to ask for the ghost’s name before introducing ourselves.

Emma: MYNAMEISEMMACARSTAIRS

Me: ANDMYNAMEISJULIANBLACKTHORN

Well, that got a reaction. As soon as I finished the last “N” the board leapt off the ground and twisted violently around. The planchette went flying and Emma went to go retrieve it from the other end of the room, but then when she came back the board went flying around in the air and, I am sorry to say, we chased it around for probably two full minutes without catching it. Eventually the ghost got bored, I guess, and the Ouija board stopped in midair and shattered into pieces, which fell to the ground. And all the candles went out. (There were sixteen pieces, if that means anything. Emma says no, I said we should mention it anyway just in case.)

So…any advice? Too much ghostly energy for an old Ouija board? Defective board in the first place? Does the ghost want to be left alone? (If so, why does it keep knocking things over?) Did we offend it? There hasn’t been anything like that since, but exploding Ouija board seemed sufficiently threatening that I wanted to get in touch. What do you think is our next step?

Again, I’m really sorry to bother you, but your help would mean a lot to me. I really want to make Blackthorn Hall a place that the Blackthorns can use again, a place that will feel like a second home for all of us. And it would be nice if people in London associated the Blackthorns with a grand manor house rather than an infamous wreck. Which is not going to happen if visitors wake up with their hair tied to the bedposts, or have their suitcases upended on the staircase. In payment, we promise you as much babysitting as you like, whenever you need. Although maybe once we’re no longer living in a collapsing death-trap.

Much obliged—

Julian

[gavrielscuppies]

EMMA TO DIARY

Dear Bruce,

Sorry it’s been a long time since I’ve written in you. Everything’s been kind of crazy since Ty sent the Ghost Sensor. Which was incredibly helpful and nice of him, and we decided that even if it didn’t work we’d still tell him it did, but that didn’t turn out to matter. It definitely works. The minute we unpacked it, it started to make weird little crackles and beeps. It didn’t seem to be reacting to anything specific, it was more like it was reacting to the environment of the house, fussing about it like a grumpy baby.

Julian decided to use it kind of like a divining rod, following where the strongest crackles and beeps seemed to be. We spent probably an hour traipsing through the house while the sensor made whistling sounds like an angry teakettle.

Eventually the sensor led us to one of the upstairs hallways. There’s no furniture in it now, and it looks a bit forlorn, with bits of tattered curtains hanging from the windows and an empty frame on the wall. It was also pretty eerie, standing in that room with the sensor going crazy but not being able to see anything. We both looked at each other, thinking,

Is there a ghost in here with us right now?

At that moment, I remembered what I’d read in Tatiana Lightwood’s diary, how she’d hidden the pages of her old diary in the wall. I went over to the wall and tapped on it. Jules picked up on what I was doing right away and started tapping on the wall as well, and we found a spot that echoed hollowly. We both stared at it for a minute, before Julian said, “Hang on.” He went downstairs and returned with a sledgehammer. He started to swing at the wall but I stopped him. “I really think you should take your jacket off while you do this. And maybe your shirt, too.”

Obligingly, he stripped down to his undershirt. That’s my guy. I may have taken a picture.

Plaster started flying everywhere. Pretty soon Julian had smashed through the wall, revealing a dark hollow space behind it.

Julian backed off while I reached inside. I cannot tell you how many spiderwebs I touched, Bruce. It was disgusting. Finally I pulled out a bunch of old clumped together pages. I can’t help but think they are Tatiana’s old diary pages, the ones she talked about destroying, but they were so water damaged that I couldn’t be sure. I was just wondering if I should tell Julian about the diary—for some reason I haven’t mentioned it to him yet—when he reached into the hole and pulled out a hard wooden board that had been engraved with letters and numbers.

“It’s a Ouija board,” he said. “Dru wanted one for Christmas last year.”

I’ve always thought of Ouija boards as being part of human superstition. Like palmistry, not something that Shadowhunters needed to take seriously. But the sensor was going crazy, beeping these dark red pulses that reminded me of Isabelle’s necklace.

“Should we try to use it?” I asked. Julian frowned. “I don’t know. When I was looking into getting one for Dru, I found out that these things can be kind of...dangerous.”

So I’m writing this right now while I’m lying in bed. Julian is already asleep, with plaster in his hair. He looks so cute. Anyway, we decided that we’d try using the ouija board tomorrow. We’re Shadowhunters, we can deal with ghosts, right?

Goodnight, Bruce. I think I’ll read a little of Tatiana’s diary to put me to sleep. Meanwhile, enjoy the eye candy.

[gavrielscuppies]

[gavrielscuppies]

Dru texts Kit