In yesterday's blog I promised I'd be posting excerpts from Olive's journal, so here's the first one! I think it only appropriate I let Olive introduce herself first.
March 29th, 1890
Dearest journal, my true and trusted confidant, my most loyal companion, I can hardly believe I turned nineteen last month! It’s an age for magnificent possibilities, extraordinary adventure, and a beautifully heartbreaking romance or two, yet since Matilda gifted you to me to replace my filled sketchbook, it has been both the wonders and trials of her past, not my future, I’ve longed to record to your pages. When she was at this incredible age, Matilda was too burdened with being the lone
guardian to me and Elliot to seek the passion and adventure owed to every young woman.
Marvelously, malevolently, adventure sought her.
In the wake of that wretched, whirlwind adventure, it took many days to make sense of what had happened, of what we’d lost or gained, of how it had changed each of us forever. Even these years later I can’t say I understand the changes wrought in me and my family. Perhaps filling your empty pages, fairest friend, can help me understand.
I was never one for recording my life through words. My attentions more often resided in the worlds of fancy in my head than in my own. Yet now that my thoughts return to those years in our rugged homestead outside New Westminster, I can’t help but feel positively cheated that Matilda’s story—as full of peculiar magic and as tragically romantic as any tale I could weave—isn’t among my collection of novels.
Now I hunger to fill your pages with memories of murder, magic, and monsters, but I know too well the dangers that lie in remembering those chapters of Matilda’s story. She taught me too well that not all memories are kindly to you—that sometimes those memories have a dark, despoiling power. The Power. No one can ever learn of the sorcery that nearly was our ruin or of the devils who wield and are wielded by it. I know you will believe each and every impossible one of my tales, dearest journal, but it is only because no one else will that I can afford to recount them to you.
It’s difficult to know when to hold memories close and when they’re better set free, but I can do neither by my own power. My sister’s story isn’t meant for the world, but nor is it meant to torment me from where it’s trapped inside my head. Your pages will keep them instead, and I will keep you safe and hidden.
The Wolf's Name is now available for preorder! You can find out more here.
Comments