In honor of my favorite time of year, Autumn, I’ve got a game for you with a free, original Mystery School mystery at the end.
A work of flash fiction appears below. It features Beatrix Marzanna, a scholar whose quiet academic life has begun to intersect with forces she once studied only from a safe distance.
The piece below contains clues. Follow them carefully.
If you solve the puzzle correctly you’ll receive an exclusive (for now) ebook from the Mystery School.
How to play:
1. Read the flash fiction below.
2. Follow the clues in the text.
3. Solve the puzzles and win the prize.
One prize. Many winners.
Begin with the first piece, below.
If you’ve got peeps who enjoy chasing down clues, give this a restack.
Who are the Brotherhood?
Beatrix pressed send. She didn’t explain the context of her query to the listserv, because she herself was uncertain of it. Only that the Brotherhood had appeared in connection with a crime—a crime that had affected a dear friend.
And she’d lost so many friends—more and more each year like pages torn from a favorite book. This was a crime she wanted solved.
Her home office darkened, a cloud bruising the room with bluish light. The colors of the oversized Tarot prints on the walls deepened.
She rubbed her aching, aging, arthritic fingers and scanned the screen. The esoteric.io group was busy today. Chats about the Green Man (always popular), alchemy, and the latest incantatory poetry.
The thread on the true death count during the European witch trials had been shut down, and she grimaced. Why did people want the numbers to be so much higher than the evidence suggested? Tens of thousands was bad enough.
An alert appeared—a response to her post.
Beatrix reached for the mouse, her hand brushing a pair of black-tipped magpie feathers. She picked them up, intending to set them aside, and hesitated. For so many years, shamanism had been theoretical for her, academic.
Magick had become much more real of late.
Something pecked at the skylight above her, and she looked up at the clear glass. An enormous crow peered down at her, a black hole punched in the sky, black as space.
Beatrix’s jaw set. Placing the feathers behind the keyboard, she adjusted her reading glasses and peered at the screen.
Her post had vanished, and the reply along with it.
“What the devil?”
Maybe the post had simply moved down the screen? She clicked the scroll button.
Nothing happened.
Beatrix clicked refresh. It took her to the group’s login page.
She logged in. The screen flashed.
⚠️ Access Denied
You are not a member of this group.
If you believe this was done in error, please contact the group moderators.
Her neck corded. “Oh, I’ll contact the moderator.” She might be in her seventies, but she was no naïf when it came to technology. She’d kept up. This had to be an error on their part.
She sent an email and rose, joints popping. The sounds would have been alarming if the creaks and cracks hadn’t grown so familiar.
The crow shifted on the roof, its talons skreeking like a key in a rusted lock.
Ambling past the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves packed with shamanic texts, academic histories, and her own journals, she walked into the kitchen, flooded with natural light. She steeped a mug of chamomile tea and stared past the drying herbs and out the window at the golden hillside. Its twisted oaks crouched like fallen gods.
Her heart lightened, warming. How could she not have felt it before? Spirit thrummed all around her, a joyful hymn of leaves and light. If only she could understand what it said...
When she returned to her small office, the response was waiting.
Beatrix,
Your recent topic has been removed and your membership in this group has been terminated.
This action was taken at the system level and I cannot reverse it. I’m sorry — this has never happened before with a post like yours.
For more information, you may want to speak with someone outside this group.
— ShadowMod42
“Outside the group?” She gaped, astonished. Who would she talk to outside the group about being removed from the group?
She typed a furious response, sat back, and sipped her tea. What nonsense. It had been a simple question. There had been no vulgarity, no politics...
Was the Brotherhood a political group?
She shook her head. Impossible. If the Brotherhood was political, it would be easier to find.
She’d searched the Internet and been overwhelmed by the word brotherhood, and none of the results had applied to her problem. Asking the esoteric.io group had been a last resort, though in retrospect, it should have been the first.
An email arrived in her inbox.
Your message couldn’t be delivered to ShadowMod42.
The email account that you tried to reach does not exist. Please try double-checking the recipient’s email address for typos or unnecessary spaces.
Her head jerked backward in surprise. It was impossible. She’d hit reply. She hadn’t mistyped the email address. How could it be gone?
Another email appeared in her inbox. She adjusted her glasses, scanning the sender. It had come from someone in the group, a person only known as T, and she opened it.
All it contained was a link: https://tinyurl.com/2fx5tecf
Her lips parted. With no thought of phishing or computer viruses, Beatrix clicked the link.
Game-play Tips
I suspect most of my readers won’t need this, but here’s the link to the walk-through if you really get stuck. 😜
lol I was very wary, but actually enjoyed it a lot! Thank you for such a fun game 😊
Very fun thanks! I loved the link in .