Becoming Northwood, Part III

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The Voices in the Fog

From the Desk of Lord Northwood

July 16th, Some names are chosen. Others rise from ruin. It was when I began to mix them that the real trouble began.

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Addison and Silas together? Disastrous. A deluge of diagrams and proclamations, visions charted on every scrap of paper within reach—ink-stained hands, sleepless tempers, chalk dust choking the air. The room would pulse with their brilliance until the walls buckled. I lived in a thunderstorm of thought, incapable of pause. I lost days. Entire fortnights vanished into their frenzied symposium.

Ivy and Addison were manageable. Disciplined, precise. They structured my time into neat little tombs—perfectly carved, utterly sterile. Mornings passed in meticulous stillness. I nearly went mad from the silence. It was focus, yes—but a kind that made me feel embalmed.

Jack and Ivy were exquisite at soirées—useless in sunlight. They looked divine in candlelight, like twin gods descended to toy with the living. But when the music faded, so did they. They'd drape themselves across the day like silk over a corpse, beautiful but inert. Their company left me enervated, drawn-out, dim. I forgot the taste of momentum.

But Jack and Addison? That was a storm I should never have summoned.

We drank all night. We wrote till dawn. Jack fed me wine and whispered lies about immortality. Addison kept a ledger of every hour I owed the day. And I—willing disciple—split myself in two trying to please them both. One for the altar, one for the fire.

I existed on fumes and fervor. They pulled me between them like a page in a holy book. Jack wanted revelation. Addison demanded scripture. I gave them both, again and again, until my bones rang hollow.

My mind fractured into mimicry. Their voices echoed inside me, until I could no longer discern where they ended and I began. I adopted their rhythms, stole their inflections, rewrote my soul to harmonize with theirs. There were moments—brief and breathless—where I thought I was becoming divine. But mostly, I felt like a marionette in someone else's play.

There were days I felt like the genius at the table.And nights I knew I was the fool.

I was a vessel of borrowed thunder. And I forgot what it meant to speak in my own storm.

Lately, I’ve begun to feel it again.

The itch behind the eyes. The hum in my temples. The rustle of parchment and possibility. I’ve begun to wonder if I should return—to the Greenvales. To the mists. To the madness.

I tell myself I only want to visit. Just a stroll through familiar paths. Just to see what blooms there now.

But I know better.

The fog is clever. It whispers in my own voice. And every time I swear I’m only passing through, I wake up weeks later, ink-drunk and starving, scribbling prophecy in the margins of my sleep.

And still—

Last night, Silas reached out to me.

I don’t know if it was a dream, a memory, or one of his little illusions, but I felt his hand in mine. Cool. Certain. Steady.

He pulled me into the thick of it—into that shimmering, starlit chaos where the real and unreal melt together like wax. Where logic gets lost and only feeling remains.

And there, in the center of it all, he whispered:

“You do not need them.” “You do not need me.” “You are the current. I am merely the tide.”

His mouth found mine and I forgot every name but my own.

Not theirs. Not his. Not even mine as the world knows it.

Only the one I speak in ink.

I felt the flood return—my ideas, my hunger, my fire. Not stolen from others. Not fashioned in their image. Mine. Their voices didn’t drown mine. They gave it a compass. A key.

As Silas held me there, a thought slipped through the haze—Jack’s voice echoing from some forgotten night at the Greenvale estate when the three of us were together.

“You’ve never really been alone,” Jack had said, breath warm with wine. “Not the way I have. It changes you. It hollows you.”

I nodded. I believed him.

And maybe I mistook his fire for a lighthouse. Maybe he thought if I walked beside him long enough, I’d never feel that kind of cold.

I began to find clarity amid the chaos within my mind—fragments piecing themselves together, a path slowly emerging through the haze.

Silas does not speak for me.He opens the door.

Ivy does not wish me numb.She wishes me protected—from a world too sharp, too cruel, too fast for a heart like mine.

Jack didn’t wish to distract me or leave me lost.

He only wanted me to have a friend. 

Even Addison—my ruthless, relentless Addison—never asked me to disappear. She simply demanded that I endure.

I do not write this to condemn them. I could never.

I loved them.

I still love them.

They live in me now. In echoes. In caution. In calibration.

But I am no longer performing for their applause. I no longer measure my worth by how many of their voices I can juggle at once.

I write now not to impress, but to inhabit. To reclaim.

To find the thread that runs beneath them all—and name it as mine.

To Jack, I raise my glass—never empty, never full. A toast to the man who showed me the allure of the night, and the cost of its dawn.

To Ivy, who kept the storm inside me from breaking loose — even when I was screaming at her to let it all go.

To Silas, I offer a sigh and a smile. You did not rescue me, old friend. You simply reminded me I never needed saving.

And to Addison—I will write when I am ready. You are still here, in more ways than one. I’m still learning how to untangle our voices, still finding my own way through the echoes.

But when I do write you…I promise I will not hold back.

Until then,

—Lord Nicholas Northwood