“I should warn you now that I’m going to draw you. I can’t help it. It’s how I pay attention.”

Clary Fairchild of Brooklyn, New York — Fray, if you knew her before — has left her sketchbook open on purpose.

A Sketchbook of the Shadow World

Hi. Okay. A few years ago I’d have told you none of this was possible. I was fifteen, I was in a club I was technically allowed into, and I watched three kids with ink all over their arms kill a boy with blue hair while the whole room danced around them and saw nothing. I thought I was losing my mind. It turned out somebody had been keeping my mind from me for years, very lovingly, and that was the night it started coming back.

So here’s what I wish I’d been told. All the stories are true. There are people who hunt the things under the bed, and they’re called Shadowhunters, or Nephilim when they’re being formal, which is most of the time. They draw on their own skin with a sort of wand and the drawings do things. They have a Law for everything and a Latin saying to go with it. They’re brave and funny and completely maddening, and a lot of them die before they’re my mother’s age, and they will tell you with a straight face that it’s an honour. I argued with that for a long time. I still do.

When I got here they handed me a book called the Codex and I wrote all over the margins. This is everything that didn’t fit. Some pages I drew from life. Some I drew from what I was told, by a woman who was there in 1878 and by a warlock who was there for all of it and would like you to know he charges for the story. Not every page is mine to tell. I’ve tried to get the faces right.

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Eight pages. Open it wherever you like.

The Clockwork Year — London, 1878. This one’s Tessa’s, and she told it to me herself, which is still strange, because she was sixteen in it and she looks about twenty now. Fog and gaslight. An Institute that’s cold and broke and run by a woman of twenty-three the Council keeps trying to get rid of. A girl straight off the boat from New York who can turn into anyone she touches the belongings of, and has no idea why. A boy who’s rude to everybody on purpose, and you can hear in Tessa’s voice that there was a reason. His best friend, who plays the violin at two in the morning and is running out of time and knows it. And a very polite man with a factory, building himself an army out of clockwork. Come here for the candlelight version. Bring a book. Tessa says she’d never have got through it without the library.

The Last Good Summer — London, 1903. Their children’s. Everybody had more or less decided the demons were finished, and a whole generation grew up on that: balls, motorcars, a room over a pub on Fleet Street where four boys kept their books and their worst ideas. A girl turns up with a golden sword, set on being a hero and saving her family, and she hasn’t worked out which comes first. A boy wears a bracelet he has never once thought about. His sister talks to ghosts and writes all of it down. Then something attacks a picnic in broad daylight, which isn’t supposed to be able to happen, and it turns out their grandfather is — no. I’ll let them find that out. Magnus was there. He says it was the prettiest of all of them, and the one that taught him to watch pretty things closely.

The Circle — Idris, the eighties. My mother’s, and I’m careful with it. They were students. They were brilliant and angry and sure the people in charge had gone soft, and the one at the front of the room was somebody you’d have followed anywhere. My mom followed him. So did Luke. So did the parents of nearly everyone I know, which nobody likes to bring up at dinner. Come here if you want to stand in the room while a good cause goes bad one reasonable sentence at a time, and find out when you’d have walked out. My mom did, in the end. She left with a cup and a baby on the way. The baby was me.

Brooklyn, Fifteen — Mine. New York, the end of summer, 2007. A nightclub. A phone call from my mother that cut off in the middle. Our apartment torn to pieces and something still in it. A cathedral that looks condemned from the street, and a cat who decides whether you get where you’re going. Simon, who’d been my whole world since we were six and came with me into every bit of it, complaining. A boy with gold hair who was insufferable. A boy with blue eyes who couldn’t stand me. A girl with a whip who scared me to death, and who I’d now walk into a fire for. A warlock in Greenpoint throwing a birthday party for his cat. And a man everybody swore had been dead for sixteen years. Start here if you want it before anyone knew anything. I knew the least of all.

The Dark War — 2008. I don’t love this page. I had a brother. I found that out and lost the idea of him in about the same week. He had a cup of his own, and he took it from Institute to Institute, and the people who drank from it kept their faces and their memories and nothing else that mattered. Kids younger than I’d been came through a Portal into Idris with no parents and no bags. We went somewhere to finish it that I still dream about: a red sky, and a city shaped like Alicante with everything burned off it. We got home because Simon paid for it, and for a long time afterwards he looked at me like a stranger being polite. Come here for the war. Just know that winning it cost the wrong people, and that the peace we made afterwards was cold on purpose.

The Academy — Simon’s, mostly. A castle in Idris that had been shut for decades, with slime in the bathrooms and soup nobody has ever identified. The Shadowhunter kids get the towers and the mundane kids get the basement, and Simon picked the basement, because of course he did. Two years of falling off horses and learning the names of things that want to eat you. At the end there’s a cup, and you drink, and most people get back up. It’s the gentlest page in here and it still has a grave in it. Come if you’d rather earn the Marks than be born with them. Catarina Loss teaches there. Be nice to her — she’s tired and she’s earned it.

The Cold Peace — Los Angeles, 2012. The Blackthorns’. I’m in this one a little, around the edges, older. A house above the Pacific full of children. A boy of seventeen who’s been running it since he was twelve and has got very good at making sure nobody notices. His parabatai, who’s the best fighter I’ve ever seen and has never stopped asking who killed her parents. Bodies left where the ley lines cross. Faeries at the door with an offer nobody’s allowed to accept, and a brother the family thought was gone for good. And back in Idris, people in very tidy uniforms who’ve decided the cure for being afraid is a list of names. The sun’s out the whole time. I think that’s why it frightens me most.

Off the Edge of the Page — Or go past everything I’ve drawn. Idris is shut, with the worst of us locked inside by their own choice. Alec is Consul — Alec — and running everyone else out of New York. There’s a king in Faerie who used to ride with the Wild Hunt. There are a couple of things out there I don’t have faces for yet, and I don’t like that. Or forget all of us. Pick an Institute I’ve never set foot in and a year nobody wrote down, and be someone none of us ever met. I left blank pages at the back for exactly that.

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Four generations. Three cities. One Law — hard, and still the Law, and broken regularly by everyone I love.

You can change it, you know. Who opens the box. Who keeps the secret. Who gets on the ship. Who says the true thing while there’s still time. I’ve redrawn every one of these pages in my head a hundred times. You actually get to.

“Okay — hold still a second. There. Got you. Go on in.”

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Commissioned by @Yeet3307

Created by Roryblake 2026© on janitorai.com

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