My dear Lia,

It is difficult to know where to begin. The beginning of this tale stretches back centuries, but I suppose I shall begin at my beginning, as my mother did for me.

My beginning was with the medallion, found in Mother’s bureau long after her death. It called to me even before I knew it existed. It must sound strange, but perhaps as you read this you are familiar with its temptation and the manner in which it insinuates itself into your thoughts, your dreams, your very breath.

At first I wore it only on occasion, as I would any other trinket from my dresser box. It was not until I woke to find the forbidding symbol etched upon my wrist that things began to change. I began to feel the power of the medallion seeping through me.

It spoke to me, Daughter, called to me. It whispered my name even when stuffed under the mattress of my bed, even when I found myself away at school or calling on friends.

Of course, I wore it. More and more, I am ashamed to say, I wore it over the mark. The Souls called me in my sleep, summoning me to the Otherworlds. At first I resisted, but it was not so for very long. I did not yet know the story of the prophecy or the stakes that lay in my continued resistance. I knew only that I felt most free, most alive, most myself, when traveling the Plane.

As I grew in the knowledge of my gifts—traveling at will while my body slept, speaking to those that had passed, casting all manner of spells—my life marched forward. I met your father and thought if ever there was a man who could love me even with the burdens of the prophecy it would be Thomas Milthorpe. And yet I did not tell him. How could I? He looked at me with such admiration, and as time passed the secret grew bigger and bigger between us until the thing I would have told him would not have been the truth as I had planned, but the lie I had kept for so long.

It was just before you and your sister were born that the sirens’ call of the Souls became more insistent. As you and your sister grew in the darkness of my womb, the Souls brought to me my own darkness. They lured me to sleep in the middle of the day. They tormented me in my dreams with images… horrible images. Images that made me ponder doing terrible things to myself even as I knew it would mean an end to you and your sister as well.

The medallion found its way to my wrist even after I locked it away in the bureau. Even after I buried it in the ground near the stables. Soon, I woke with it encircling my wrist even when I had not put it on before retiring. I felt sure I was losing my tenuous hold on sanity.

Looking back on that time, I know not how I managed to survive it, though I feel quite sure it was due in large part to the careful attentions of your father and Virginia. They rarely let me out of view.

Once you were born, you and your sister, the softness of your heads, the rose blush of your cheeks, the deepening green of your eyes… they all served to make me believe that perhaps there was something worth fighting for in this world even if it meant holding the evil at bay. I thought perhaps I could manage, if only to stay and be your mother.

And for a time it seemed to work just that way. I still felt the pull of the Souls. I still traveled in my dreams, though not as often. But nothing very terrible happened. You and your sister grew, crawled, walked, and spoke. My family remained safe, and if I brought anything, anyone, back from my night travels it seemed no one was the wiser.

I know now, of course, that it was a kind of fairy tale, those years when the medallion, the prophecy, and all of us, lived peacefully together. And then I found out about Henry. I discovered that I would have another child, though the doctor had cautioned against it after the difficult birth of you and your sister. Still, what was there to do but be proud that I might finally offer your father a son?

And proud I was—for a while. But as Henry grew in the darkest part of me, another kind of darkness gripped me so completely that I became truly frightened. I wanted to escape, Daughter. I wanted to visit the Otherworlds every hour of every day, and I wanted to bring the Army back with me, as many Souls as I was able, though I knew it was for no good purpose. Their howl became a song I never wanted to stop hearing.

But even this was not the thing that frightened me most, that made me realize how far I had slipped into evil, how close to madness. No. It was the greed with which I began to view my travels, so that soon I was forcing myself to lie still on my bed at all hours of the day and night in order to will myself into traveling, forgoing food and sometimes company to sleep, only sleep, for never did I feel as complete as when I traveled. It was this that finally made me afraid.

When Henry was born… well, it was another difficult birth as I was told to expect. The doctor could not do another operation, and Henry’s feet were down instead of his head. His legs… I do not have to tell you, Daughter. You know what happened to his legs. The doctors pulled as gently as they could, but he would have died had they not gotten him out when they did.

I was very sick after he was born. Not just tired and weak, but sad and angry and hateful, as if all the good had seeped out of me during Henry’s birth only to be replaced by everything mean and evil that the medallion embodied. I would have flashes of love for you, for your sister and brother, for your father, but they were all too brief, settling on me like a butterfly and gone a moment later.

I slept more than ever, and when I awoke I knew with a certainty both sick and joyous that I had brought the Souls back with me. It is this streak of satisfaction that has made me realize that I do not have the strength to fight the legacy that is mine.

I am weak. I know you shall think me a coward, but how am I to stop a circle that was begun at the beginning of time? How am I, alone, to fight a thing that has won battle after battle through the ages? And most of all, how am I to pass this legacy, this curse, on to you? How am I to look you in those clear green eyes and tell you what awaits?

Virginia is wise—wise and clear-headed. She will surely give you better counsel than I, in my current state of despair, can offer. I cannot bear the thought of passing this burden, of all things, on to you, my beautiful Lia.

So along with it, I shall bequeath you every last drop of my protection. The Souls will come for you, of this I am sure, but I shall use every ounce of power, every spell that would see me banished from the Sisterhood, to see you safe while you sleep. It is all I can do.

Please know at this moment, as I put this letter in a safe place and make my way to the lake, I am thinking of you with love. I wish I had sage advice, but all I can offer you is my love, and the hope—no, the belief—that you are somehow stronger and braver than I, that you will take this battle to its end once and for all. And win it for all the sisters before you, and those yet to come.

There is nothing else. No answer. No guidance.

She knew it was I. That much is a revelation. Aunt Virginia may not have known at first, may not have pieced together the confusion of our birth, Alice’s and mine, and the consequences it would have. But our mother somehow knew that there was no escaping fate, no matter how chaotic and random it sometimes seems.

It was she who carved the circle of protection into the floor around my bed. Though I was only a girl, I remember moving from the nursery, from the small room I shared with Alice, not long before our mother died. Now the separation seems less a random rite of passage than a calculated move on the part of our mother.

A move to protect me from my sister.

That Alice’s rage and greed have led her to a place where she would sacrifice me to the Souls… it is beyond imagining. I cannot even reconcile that my sister could see her way to send me to my death, to something worse than death, by way of the Void.

My fury, my disbelief, is an itch I long to scratch. But it will only do harm to our quest for answers. The smart thing, the wise thing, is to let Alice think me still ignorant.

And to let her believe that she holds all the power.