Oh boy. It is begining to become the serious blame game. Tilly does seem like a suspect, and Darkling is becoming more unlikely, really. But I geuss I'll stick with Darkling still, but be suspisous of Tilly.

@Eclipse: why thank you! do let me know if the key to the universe does appear at some point; i've been looking for it.

@Hawkstar: yep! Tilly is now Not A Suspect, though, due to her untimely death...

@Reuby: I suppose that's possible, if there's some way her alibis can be gotten around. you shall see.

part eleven! And Then There Were Twelve, Not Including Pix.

---

There was something peculiarly pleasant about being the only person awake, Writing reflected. Something lonesome but oddly freeing, oddly special, as if the sun had woken one up just so that one could be the only soul to see its splendor.

Of course, in this case, Pix had woken Writing, Tilly, and Echo Hallowswift with little more than a shove to the shoulder and a whisper about helping in the kitchens. There was still that business of murderers going about murdering people, so Pix left 
Writing to stand guard in the ballroom and make sure no one slipped away, while she, Tilly, and Echo made breakfast. Echo had mentioned the fact that, while I don't think it's you, Tilly, you're still technically a suspect, and is it safe, Pix? Pix had replied that anyone around her was safe, because Calloway killed without witnesses and he did not kill Pix. Which was inexplicable but feasible, so Echo and the rest had accepted it. Writing had been rather leery of standing guard in a room full of potential murderers with no weapons so Pix informed xem that the kitchens were only a run and a shout away, should anything suspicious arise.

Now Writing was standing by the wall across from the double doors, the door Pix, Tilly, and Echo had slipped through left ajar, with a headful of wandering thoughts. Their eyes flicked back to the ballroom whenever anyone stirred, but mostly the hall was quiet and their eyes were fixed absently on the blue sky visible through the tall narrow windows on either side of the double doors. It was quietening, calming, to stand alone in a great, lonesomely beautiful, ancient room looking at the sky, the only sounds the infrequent stirrings of the sleeping ski lodgers, the distant clamor and chatter from the kitchen, xyr own heartbeat. He liked people, really, but lots of them at once tended to exhaust him, after a while. It was nice to be alone, in such a situation, where alone was often followed, several paragraphs later, by dead. That was what was going to happen today, unfortunately.

I had been thinking all this while, while Writing was absorbed in xyr own thoughts and Pix and Tilly and Echo were away in the kitchen. I'd been awakened by Pix's awakening of the other three, but I had not shown it. Sleep is the best alibi, after death, and unavoidable appointments in Switzerland.

The world was hungry. It permeated my subconscious, searching, wanting. Beneath the blankets I slipped my hand into my pocket. Before sleep Pix had had the presence of mind to search the suspects for weaponry, but it was simple enough to palm the knife and slip it in between the pages of my book. I'd burnt the bow and quiver -- they were too large to hide easily, and I could do without my victims having one more weapon.

My plan had been formulated. I had to kill Tilly, too, which wasn't ideal, as it narrowed the suspects down to six -- unfortunately, I had been caught among them. But I'd manage. I always did.

I got to my feet, quietly enough that Writing's reverie didn't break, and I approached him with silent footsteps. I stood and appraised them. They were just so young. So alive. I did not want to kill them.

But in the end, it all came back to Rose, and I had to.

Writing looked to me a moment, xyr eyes wide with terror. He opened his mouth -- to scream, to speak, to do anything but what he did next, which was collapse to the ground. I walked up to them and said, idiotically, "I'm sorry" -- as if an apology is sufficient repayment for someone's life, even in a story. Writing slumped down.

I stepped quietly out the door and walked down the hall to the kitchen. I paused on the threshold, watching the CBer, AE, and sister inside. Happy. Golden-lit, from the morning light streaming through the beveled windows. Then I slipped inside, and shut the door behind me, and I killed them.

Echo Hallowswift and Tilly were dead on the floor, and they shouldn't have been.

"I don't see why you do this," she said, tears dripping down her face as she knelt by the two ski lodgers I had just killed. She had tried to stop me, but she was considerably smaller and magic-less than I was. She had thought I wouldn't kill with her watching, when she could see which face I had stolen. She still didn't realize that was how I kept getting away with it. I kept doing things she thought I would never do.

"Except you do," I said in reply, flicking water off my hands and searching for a towel. I turned around to face her, and she stood and handed me one. It was a curiously civil gesture on her part, considering our circumstances.

"Yes, but I don't understand it," Pix insisted tearfully, wiping her nose on a dishrag while she leant on the long table where an abandoned bowl of eggs-to-be-scrambled sat. "I'm not real, Daniel -- none of this is, really.

"You aren't imaginary," I objected, as I folded the towel. It was a curiously civil gesture on my part, considering our circumstances. "You're exactly as you were, before."

She dropped her arms by her sides and gave me a look. It was a familiar, stubbornly-exasperated-but-still-affectionate look, the look Rose used to give me when I made up stories instead of doing homework, and it had always ceaselessly amused me, because, despite the fact that she was four years younger than me, Rose had always managed to be more responsible than I. It was a look that said, you know that's not right, Daniel, honestly. "Daniel. I'm Pix. I'm a fairy princess. I didn't have moth wings before, you know. Well, I don't now, anymore, but still. You know what I mean. And you. You're Calloway. This isn't real -- this was never real."

"I made it real," I said, and she sighed and turned away from me, arms akimbo. "It isn't worth it. It was never worth it. I don't understand" -- her voice broke -- "I don't know how you can do this."

"It's for you," I said.

"Yeah, well, thanks, but I don't want it," she said bitterly, and clambered onto a stool. She put her head in her hands, and stared at where Echo and Tilly lay on the floor, two girls who shouldn't have died. Who shouldn't have come here in the first place, to this place that shouldn't exist with this brother of hers. She began to cry.

I sighed, fast and hard, and I walked over and put my arms around her. At first she flinched away, but then she leaned into me, crying. "You h-have to l-let go, Danny," she whispered.

"I can't." She kept crying. I caught sight of us in the polished reflection of the stove. Two girls dead on the floor. Another, smaller, on a stool, crying into me, except it wasn't me. I frowned at my reflection, wishing suddenly that I had my own face again, but then the moment passed. I had to do this.

I let go of Rose, and she stared at me with red-rimmed ocean eyes. "What are you going to do?" she asked. "I know who you're pretending to be now. I can tell them all. I will, just as soon as you unlock the door."

"No, you won't," I said. I cupped her face in my hands, and added, "Sorry," before I started using my magic, precisely locating this happenstance in her mind. I layered over the complicated magics I had already woven to prevent her from undoing my work another enchantment, a fragilely specific enchantment that prevented her from speaking of my stolen identity. One of the advantages of being a magical shapeshifting murderer is that, when one's younger sister tries to foil one's scheme, one can enchant her not to. I did not like using my magic on Rose, but it was a necessity. It was all a necessity.

I dropped my hands, and Rose watched me with broken blue eyes as I walked over to the door and unlocked it, slipping back down the corridor and into the ballroom. Again I pretended to sleep, but it wasn't long before I was startled out of it by Darkvine's cry of alarm. Soon Tilly and Echo Hallowswift were discovered too. Pix told them all that Calloway had enchanted her not to reveal his identity, but true to the magic, she did not so much as glance at me as she spoke. Of course all the ski lodgers erupted in new and exciting terrors, and Darkvine revised her notes, and the murdered were buried. That was how it went now, those days: they would round up food every now and then, explore different bits of the Castle, read poetry, and every day they would be casting glances over their shoulders, waiting, waiting for when someone else would die. Waiting for the seemingly-inevitable moment when that someone else would be them.

---

Dead: Azalea, WiLdSoNg, Ame, Celeste, Poinsettia, Writing, Tilly, Echo Hallowswift

Alive: Lyra, Hex, Eclipse, Artemis, Sapphire, Darkvine, Darkling, Hawkstar, Writing, Amethyst, Reuby, Strawberry

Ok, geez. I don't think I am the murder, because they took Hawkstar's knife, but, idk, maybe thats to through everyone of the trail.

*bangs on wall*

...

...

*sobs*

...

...

I'M D-D-DEAD...

...

...

AND I DIDN'T DIE DRAMATICALLYYYY....

...

...

BWAHHHHH....

*bangs head against wall*

...

...

Seriously, though, this is insanely good! 

@Writing: yes, Pix and Calloway are Rose and Daniel, and Rose and Daniel are Pix and Calloway. interesting theory; we're approaching The Finale, so you'll have your answers soon enough. and thank you <3

@Hex: oh good! i've never written a murder mystery before, so i'm glad it's turning out alright -- sufficiently mysterious to qualify, and definitely sufficiently murderous. Ski-Lodge-You are indeed investigating; thanks for that suggestion.

@Celeste: i suggest a sweater. & ty !

@Hawkstar: yep, you're a bit less suspicious due to that fact.

@Echo: it is indeed tragic. i didn't even have the common courtesy to write a dramatic death scene for you. --tysm!

part twelve!

---

"What do we do now?"

Darkvine said this while she stared at her scribbled notes, pressing the end of a pen to her chin. They were back in the library, theorizing, seated in a sloppy circle on the ornate carpet. Lyra still had tear tracks drawn on her cheeks; Pix didn't seem to be listening. Everyone else had an expression of vague fear, suspicion, or (in several cases) something unreadable. "The murderer is picking us off," Darkvine continued, still gazing at the notes but her mind entirely elsewhere. "We need to find him. We need to stop him, before any more of us die."

"We look for the body," Hex said suddenly. She looked up and met Darkvine's eyes.

Darkvine frowned, luminescent eyes narrowed. "What? Whose?"

"The first," Hex said. "The one Calloway killed, and then shifted to look like. That will tell us who the murderer is."

"We're not even --" Reuby began, but Darkvine interjected. "We're pretty sure it's Calloway, Reuby, and that's a fact. He must have killed one of us and took their place." Darkvine looked back at Hex.

"Right," Hex said.

"Do you think he buried them?" Amethyst asked hesitantly.

"It's possible," Hex said. "But even if he did, we can probably find the place. It's only been three days; the earth would still be fresh."

"What then? Are we honestly discussing exhuming a body?" Lyra said, uncharacteristic acid dripping from her words.

"We probably won't have to," Eclipse said thoughtfully. "Calloway wouldn't go to the trouble of burying a body. He'd probably just hide it, then take their face -- he'd need a reference for that, likely -- and kill Azalea. Anyway," she added, glancing at Lyra, "it's not pleasant, obviously, but better to dig up a body than the rest of us die. Don't you think?"

Lyra didn't reply. it was possible she hadn't even heard Eclipse; her eyes were glazed and faraway, and it was clear that she was thinking of Echo. That was why she had protested, probably -- thoughts of Echo, in her own grave. Probably. Lyra was still a suspect, after all.

"Calloway's magical," Darkvine said. "Maybe he made the body invisible, or teleported it, or something. We really don't know the extent of his powers." She glanced at Pix, who said only, unhelpfully vague, "He might've done that."

"He'd likely hide it somewhere in here," Sapphire said, gesturing around at the shelves and shelves of books around them. "That'd be easier."

"That's helpful," Darkling said, in that way of theirs that made it difficult to tell sarcasm from sincerity. "To be colloquial, it's a needle of questionable existence in a haystack. This place is vast, and probably has multitudes of untold hiding places only Calloway knows about; only one has a corpse, if any of them do."

"We have to try," Hex said. "It's that or die."

"Catchy adage," Darkling said. "I suppose you'll be wanting all we suspects trussed up somewhere so we can't interfere with the searching."

"We will, I guess," Darkvine said. "But who's to guard them? We only seem to be safe in numbers. Not even Pix can save us, now, as Echo and Tilly and Writing proved."

"We could, like, literally truss them up," Hex said. "Tie them up, or lock them up, or something."

"I don't like that," Amethyst said. "Five of them are innocent. Five of them are just like us. They don't deserve to be treated like murderers."

"Nobody likes it," Hex said. "But it kind of looks like our only option, if we're going to search for the body." She looked to Pix, who nodded. "It's a good idea," she said, something hollow in her voice. "We ought to have thought of it before; it's about the only way we can ascertain our safety."

"But what if Calloway magics the locks open?" Sapphire asked.

"He'll still be pretty far away from us, if we do it right," Darkvine said. "We'll put them somewhere else in the Castle. We'll stay in groups in the library, keep an eye out."

"I don't suppose we have any say in this," Artemis said, resignedly.

"No," Hex said. "Sorry."

"What if Calloway kills us while we're locked up with him?" Hawkstar protested.

"He won't do that," Pix said. "It would reveal his identity. There's no way he could kill one of you without the others seeing."

"Well, then let's do it," Darkvine said. "Pix -- can you find a room with a lock and no windows for the suspects? Everyone else -- let's form groups, and start searching." Nobody commented on how Darkvine and Hex had silently taken over the role of leader from Pix; how, only two days ago, it had been Pix giving them orders, not the other way around. Since Tilly's, Echo's, and Writing's deaths, Pix had been quiet and subdued. She had let the other two take charge without remark.

They did it. Darkling, Reuby, Hawkstar, Eclipse, Artemis, and Lyra were locked by Pix into an opulent but stifling study. The rest stayed in the library, and Hex and Darkvine divided them into two groups to search the library, one green-eyed investigator to each. They were remarkably few, after the suspects and investigators had been accounted for -- only Strawberry, Amethyst, and Sapphire remained. Hex led the first, and Darkvine the latter two.

They were only fairly certain there was a body to be looked for, and they had no idea whatsoever where it might be, if it existed, but the library where everything had gone Christie seemed like a good place to start.

The library was very large, and most of it was blocked from view, wherever one stood, by the tall bookshelves and assorted furniture. The only place where one could actually see the entirety of the room was from the tops of the narrow wooden ladders that led up the highest bookshelves along the walls. From scaling one of these, they ascertained that the library was perfectly square in shape, and the door that led from the corridor off the ballroom was located in the northwestern corner. They decided to find the place where Azalea had died, and go from there in their search, splitting in opposite directions.

Azalea's place of death was on the southern side of the library, that familiar emerald-colored armchair by a now-cold fireplace. They lingered by the chair for a bit, Hex running an absent hand along the velvety fabric, and then they set to searching. They opened closet doors and peered down aisles of books, pulled out books from shelves in hopes of discovering secret passages, even checked the floor for loose boards that might hide secret cellars. Soon both groups were far from their starting place, and each other.

"I don't think we're going to find anything," Amethyst remarked, pulling out another dusty tome from a tall shelf against the wall, and not finding a secret doorway for the seventeenth time in a row.

Darkvine glanced at her, and then continued running her hands over the seams of the floorboards. "Are you saying that because you think it's true, or because you want it to be?"

Amethyst sighed. "Both, I guess."

"She has a point, though. We've been searching for an hour, and we haven't found anything," Sapphire said, leaning against the wall and staring at a bookshelf opposite, either in investigation or boredom.

"Well, he wouldn't've made it easy," Darkvine said. "And he knows this place a lot better than we do. Darkling's right -- he probably has all kinds of secret passages and stuff for corpse-hiding."

Suddenly she stood with an indeterminate noise of frustration, and dusted off her knees. "Let's move on, lizards. There's nothing here."

With no protest, Amethyst reshelved the book she'd been flipping through, and she and Sapphire followed Darkvine deeper into the library.

"LIZARDS! COME SEE THIS!"

They all stopped in their tracks. It was Strawberry's voice, imbued with a bit of her old energy. "They've found something?" Amethyst said dubiously.

"They've found something!" Darkvine exclaimed. "Come on, let's go!"

Following the sound of Strawberry's voice, they made their way through the library. When they arrived, they found Hex and Strawberry standing before a bare expanse of wall, a bookshelf moved aside to clear the space.

Amethyst came up beside the other two, her questions dying on her lips as she saw what they were looking at. Strawberry was holding open a door, and behind it was a dark flight of steps, leading up into blackness.

"This was behind the bookshelf...?" Darkvine asked, staring.

"Yeah," Strawberry said, peering up into the dark. "Where do you think it goes?"

"Let's find out," Darkvine said. "Maybe this is where he hid the body."

Hex grabbed a candlestick from a nearby coffee table and pulled a box of matches from her pocket. In a moment, they had light, and then, in wordless agreement, they went into the dark.

I followed.

Ahhhh! My heart was beating so fast, and then it, like, ended. so sad.

Name: Ayles Challowgate (Ayles)

CBer or AE: n/a

Pronouns: She/her

Apperance: Brown hair, blue eyes, pink dragon wings(What? I like wings!)

Personality: Shy and kind

What would you wear?: T-shirt(pink) and jeans

Other: n/a

@Hawkstar: well, I'm flattered that my writing can produce fast heart-beating, I suppose :)

@Ayles: unfortunately, this ski lodge has already closed for submissions and as this is the second-to-last-part, I don't think I'll be able to write you in. but ty for your interest, as the rejection letters say.

okay, part thirteen! more weird conceptual story stuff, Calloway backstory, and Writing, you were right~

---

The steps were spiraling and narrow and ancient, and they creaked with every footfall. The light from Hex's candle threw the ski lodgers' shadows on the dusty wooden walls, stretched and monstrous. They climbed for a long time; when the candlelight finally illuminated a tall, narrow door at the top of the staircase, they had climbed for so long Darkvine felt certain they were at the very top of the Castle, at the summit of one of its many towers.

Hex grasped the brass doorknob and turned it. The door was jammed, so she slammed her shoulder against it, jostling the candle and nearly extinguishing it. The door burst open with a protesting screech of its ancient hinges. The five ski lodgers spilled out into a spare and beautiful room, illumined softly by light from the mullioned windows placed around the circumference of the room. It was octagonal, its walls taken up largely by stuffed bookshelves. On the far side of the room there was a broad desk, scattered with many pens, stacks of books, and a tall white candle in an elegant brass holder.

Strawberry walked over to the nearest window and peered out of it. "We're like a hundred feet up!" she exclaimed, staring out into the vast blue.

"What is this place?" Darkvine asked no one, turning around to gaze at the whole of the room. "A study? A private library?"

"And why is it hidden?" Sapphire added.

"Probably because there's something worth hiding in it," Amethyst said. "Maybe this is where Calloway hid the body." She walked to a near bookshelf and ran her fingers over the worn spines, as if looking for all the secret doorways she hadn't found in the library below.

Hex did not speak, only crossed the room to the desk. She sat in the unadorned wood chair behind it, and picked up the nearest book, a small leather-bound volume that had been left open to the most recently-written page. She squinted at the narrow, cramped cursive. "December eighteenth, 2022," she read aloud from the top of the page.

Strawberry looked away from the window, and to Hex. "A journal?"

"It looks like it," Hex said. She read: "I have sent out another letter. Children, again. The world is hungry. Rose tried to convince me to stop, as she always does. She says it isn't worth it." Hex frowned.

Darkvine came over and took the journal from Hex. She riffled through the pages, scanning the entries. "It must be Calloway's," she said quietly, not taking her eyes off the pages.

"Calloway's?" Sapphire said this as she, Amethyst, and Strawberry gathered around the other side of the desk. "But who's Rose? What does 'the world is hungry' mean?"

Amethyst picked up another book, this one forest-green, and opened it. "This is a journal too," she said. Sapphire took another, and Strawberry a third. They both nodded; Strawberry said, "They're all journals."

Hex frowned again. "Sorry, but I've having trouble assimilating our evil murderer Calloway with journal-writing thought-having Calloway."

"Evil murderers are people too!" Darkvine said, and added, "Let's read them. Usually I'd be, like, wary of invading people's personal space, but we're kind of past that since Calloway is killing us. Maybe these will tell us why. And who Rose is. And who he's impersonating."

"I feel like we should focus on finding the body," Sapphire said. "Maybe it's in this room. And if it is, it's a much faster and surer way of finding the murderer's identity than reading his old journals is."

"Well, why can't we do both?" Strawberry said. "You and Amethyst and I will search for the body, and these two can read the journals and try to find anything useful. This place isn't very big. It probably won't take long to find anything, if there's anything to find."

Darkvine pointed at Strawberry. "Excellent idea. Y'all do that."

For a quiet half of an hour, that is what they did. Sapphire, Amethyst, and Strawberry combed the room for anything that could hide a corpse, and Darkvine and Hex read my thoughts. The first three found little, and the latter two found much in the way of unexplained shards of my history, but not in the way of answers, at least at first. They read the first two journals with some skepticism, written when I was quite young -- nine, ten.  They chronicled, in scrawls of varying legibility, the same sort of life ordinary nine- and ten-year-old boys led, in the real world. I went to school; I hated this person and was best friends with that one; during the summers, I and my younger sister Rose stayed with our grandparents at a rambling country house next to a vast lake that I used to swim in. These earlier journals seemed completely out of place to Darkvine and Hex, scraps of ordinary real life ostensibly belonging to a magical shapeshifting ski lodge host who was murdering them. They were pieces of a world the ski lodgers were in no longer, and were completely incongruous with their surroundings -- journals about somebody's normal life, read in a secret tower in a Castle by the Lake that doesn't exist. The only thing remotely related to the Calloway and the Castle and the Lake that they knew was the lake by my grandparents' house, and that was little more than a coincidence, or seemed that way. Things only began making sense for the Chatterboxers when they first read of the Castle by the Lake, of a fairy princess with moth wings named Pix, of a magical shapeshifter named Calloway. 

You see, my darlings, the Castle is not real.

You already know this, of course. You're reading this on the Chatterbox. It's only a ski lodge. It's a story, written by some other human being that you will never meet in your real lives, a human under the alias of my name and her made-up one, stolen from a goddess because she thinks it sounds cool. It's not real. The Castle is not real, and neither is Pix, and neither am I. Even inside of the story, we know this. Story-you know that story-Artemis is writing the story, that she is me, that I'm a character she conceived of and decided to write from the perspective of because it's creepier if the murderer narrates the ski lodge. The story is not real even inside of the story, and it's not real inside of the story inside of the story inside of the story, either. The Castle by the Lake is a made-up land that my sister and I pretended we lived in when we were children. She pretended she was a fairy princess. I pretended I was a shapeshifter who owned a grand Castle by a Lake. We transformed our grandparents' house and their tame fishing lake into a world full of magic and mystery and wonder, a world we were the king and queen of. That is nothing spectacular. Everyone pretends to be a magic king when they're a child. When they're older, they either forget about it or they write stories about children pretending to be magic kings, which is what I did, what I am doing at this very moment, as I sit in a room writing this on a laptop in a city in a state of a country in the same world you're reading it in. I'm the writer of this story. Inside the story, I'm Calloway, and inside the story inside the story, I'm Daniel, the child pretending to be Calloway.

All this to say the Castle by the Lake is not real. Darkvine and Hex read of it in my journals, but first only in the context of a game Rose and I played. That was the first important thing: the Castle began as an invented thing, even inside of its own story.

The second important thing was that Rose is dead.

This fact is mentioned in one falling-apart entry in the third journal, written when I was twelve on the twenty-fourth of July, scrawling across the page in pen pressed so hard the paper tore. It was a car crash -- tragic and sudden and too common. For four months, there are no entries at all. Then, on December eighteenth, I wrote an entry that goes like this:

I had the strangest dream last night. I was sitting on the old dock by the lake, and someone asked where Rose was. I don't remember what they looked like or sounded like, only that they were sitting beside me. I told them she died in the car crash. They asked me lots of questions, about the Castle and Calloway and stuff. That game Rose and I used to play. Then they asked me if I would like her back.

I said yes, of course, but it's impossible.

They said no, it isn't. So I asked them how. They said I could go to the Castle, and Pix would be there. I told them I didn't want Pix, I wanted Rose. They said Pix and Rose were the same, and then I was at the Castle. Whoever it was was gone, and I was on the dock on the Lake. It and the Castle looked just like we'd always imagined it. The Castle was huge, across on the other side of the Lake. Pix was beside me this time. She looked exactly as Rose did, except she had wings like a moth. She talked to me -- I don't remember what she said, but her voice was Rose's. She was Rose, except a fairy, except not real. At the end of the dream she told me that I could stay with her in the Castle, if I did what the person who was with me at the beginning of the dream asked. Then she told me to wake up, and I did.

I don't know what it means. Is it crazy that I think it might possibly be real?

I want it to be real.

The entries afterward detail the other dreams I had, nearly every night for five months, and on May second, two weeks after my thirteenth birthday, I wrote in my journal only to say that I had agreed. The person whose face I could never remember told me that the world of the Castle required souls of storytellers to keep itself alive. If I killed people to sustain the world for seven years, the world could exist by itself, and I would be free to live out the remainder of my indeterminately long life with Pix who was Rose who was Pix in our Castle. It was a strange contract, oddly specific in the way of a fairy tale -- seven years, souls of storytellers in exchange for a sister -- but I accepted it anyway. I had not healed from Rose's death. I loved her more than anyone else in the world. But the real world had no Rose in it, anymore, so I left it behind and came to this one. That's why I kill you -- for her. She hates it, and she has tried a hundred times to convince me to stop, to let go of her, to go back to my real life in the real world, to move on. I never waver. This world might be imaginary, but it's the only place where her goneness is not ever-present, ever-penetrating my thoughts; it's the only place where it doesn't hurt.

The last journal -- there are four in all -- chronicles only my time in the Castle, and the murders. It is only half-filled; this ski lodge is my first attempt at murder. I had hoped it would go smoothly, but not so you. I should have known better.

When Hex and Darkvine had read enough of the journals to understand what all had happened -- not my stolen identity, though, of course; I never write that down -- they came to the most important book. It was a huge tome, simple black, its pages halfway filled with neat, typewritten words. At first they thought it was another journal of some kind, maybe just a regular book, but it soon became clear that it was, in fact, the ski lodge.

The night was still and dark and quiet, reads the first page.

Because nights generally were still and dark and quiet, and this was a perfectly ordinary night, Reuby told herself, a little crossly. There was no reason why it shouldn't be.

This book is the most important and most secret part of the Castle's world. This book holds the ski lodge that the Castle lives in, holds the only existence the Castle now has to its name: this story that you are reading at this very moment. It writes itself, and it is the soul of the magic that keeps this place alive. It is the only part of the Castle that was not imagined by me or Rose; it was, I think, created by the faceless person who gave me my contract. The person who is the world. Or the ski lodge. The Mystery, maybe. I don't know. The important thing is that the book is the ski lodge, and it can be written in. Anyone who has the book decides what happens next.

When Darkvine and Hex discovered these important things, they told Sapphire, Amethyst, and Strawberry. The other three had not found any corpses under the floorboards, nor would they. It wasn't very important, though, because at the same time the five of them were discussing in earnest the implications of the journals and the ski lodge, and watching as these words appeared on the latter's latest page, I was opening the door of my study with the purpose of killing them.

At the appearance of these words on the page, they looked up, scrambling to their feet. And because ski lodge-writers are fond of over-dramatic endings, Strawberry said, "Artemis?"