It took longer than I'd like to admit to decrypt the Witch's notes and even then they weren't the most clarifying. Nance had been an assistant until he was on the wrong side of the ritual, and they had been working for decades with no real rhyme or reason. It wasn't until I brought others in on the secret that I started to get it.

They believed they could get what they wanted through sacrifice and they had high hopes. The notes were riddled with inarticulate racist screeds, paranoid doctrines, petty delusions, manic hopes. They had theories and hypotheses and experiments. More organized than I wanted them to be, to the detriment of everyone around them. It was interesting, inexcusable work; they were testing responses, seeing what could or couldn't be given to them. I don't know what caused the Witch and Nance to come to odds, but once Nance was out of the picture it was clear the goals became more desperate, more sloppy, leading me to him and to his death.

I sat on it for another 15 years. Isn't that funny? To keep it all inside for 34 years of my life. I was 42 when I told someone else and it was a woman I met at a gay bar. I told her less than a year after meeting her. Yet that still just broke a seal. It demystified something forbidden. And it lead to a new purpose: community pillar by day, scholar by night, surrounded by three other women. A piece of my heart, even if she never returned my advances, by my side. A protégé who helped us all realize our potential. An asset embedded in the community, watchful, patient, lethally clever. We all believed in the purpose of containing the knowledge, up until we started to see what holding it back was costing the world.

https://thecoffin.club