Letter I
London, Two Weeks After Arrival, July 11th, 1767
My dearest Juliette,
Even now, as I write this, I find myself smiling like a fool at the memory of your handwriting. It is absurd how a thing so small—ink pressed into paper by your careful hand—can steady a man in a city as vast and restless as London. I miss you in the quiet moments most. In the pauses between bells. In the spaces where your voice ought to be.
London is everything the pamphlets promised and everything they dared not admit. Smoke rises like a second sky, and the streets pulse with motion—carts rattling over stone, machines coughing awake, men shouting futures they barely understand. There is beauty here, yes, but it is unevenly shared. One may walk from marvel to misery in the span of a single street. I have seen children with soot in their hair stare at shop windows glowing like altars. Progress, it seems, chooses its favorites.
And yet—oh, Julie—how alive it all feels. I came here hungry for a story, for something worth the ink and the miles between us, and I believe I may have found its beginning in the most unremarkable of places: a public house off a narrow street whose name I cannot recall.
There, over cheap ale and poorer music, I met a man called Hugo.
He spoke with an accent I could not place and named a town I have never heard of—Mystic Falls. I laughed at first, certain I would have remembered such a name from some map or margin note. He did not laugh with me. There was something guarded in him, something deliberate, as though every word had first been weighed and found dangerous.
We have spoken since. More than once. I find myself drawn to him, to the way his stories stop just short of revelation. I suspect—no, I hope—that I have stumbled onto something rare.
Pray for me, my love. I believe adventure has finally noticed me.
Yours, always,
Carter
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Letter II
London, October 14th, 1767
My darling Julie,
Forgive me. I deserve the sharpest rebuke you can manage in ink. Your last letters reached me in a cluster, and I have read them all twice over, especially the part about the roses finally blooming despite the late frost. Leave it to you to coax beauty out of stubborn things.
The fault is mine alone. The days have slipped through my fingers faster than I intended, and I fear London has taught me bad habits. Still—no excuses. Only apologies.
Much has changed in these past three months. Hugo and I have grown… close, for lack of a better word. He speaks more freely now, though never easily, and I have learned a great deal about his home. Mystic Falls lies somewhere near the Americas, though he grows evasive when pressed for specifics. He speaks of forests older than memory, of hills that refuse to stay still on maps, of a place the world somehow missed.
Julie, there is fear in him.
Not the kind born of superstition or ignorance, but something sharper. Intentional. When he realized the depth of my interest, his hands shook. He asked me—quietly—why I wished to know. When I told him the truth, that the world deserved to hear such a story, he looked at me as if I had proposed setting fire to a library.
That, of course, only deepened my resolve.
I have convinced him to take me there.
I know how that sounds. Reckless. Romantic. Entirely like me. But I swear to you, there is something important wrapped up in that place, something larger than either of us. If I can bring it to light, if I can put words to it, then every mile between us will have been worth it.
Hold faith in me, my Julie. I carry you with me in all things.
Ever yours,
Carter
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Letter III
London, December 1st, 1767
My beloved,
Merry Christmas, though I know the words arrive early and poorly dressed in apology. I would give much to be with you this season—to see you laugh at the cold, to steal warmth from your hands when you are not looking. Tell your sister the bakery she recommended is a triumph. I fear I have been there more often than propriety allows.
London in winter is a strange wonder. Smoke clings lower to the streets, and the lamps glow like cautious stars. There is a hush beneath the noise, as though the city itself pauses to listen.
On the fourteenth, I will leave.
Hugo has agreed. We depart for Mystic Falls before the year's end, crossing waters and certainties alike. I know what you will say—that I chase ghosts, that I lean too hard into the unknown. You are not wrong. But this feels… different. Not like a hunt. Like an invitation that will not be offered twice.
Wish me luck, my love. Not courage—I have that in excess—but clarity. Whatever waits for us there, I believe the world has never truly seen it.
I promise to write the moment I can.
Until then, hold me in your thoughts as I hold you in mine.
Yours, beyond distance and doubt,
Carter Augustine Winghelm
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Letter IV
Mystic Falls, June 12th, 1768
My Juliette,
If this letter ever reaches you, know first that my silence was not born of neglect. For six months I have written in my head and nowhere else. There is no reliable post here, no road that leads cleanly outward, no courier willing to promise more than a shrug. I have learned the hard way that some places do not like being left, and like even less being spoken of beyond their borders.
Mystic Falls lies at the end of a road I am certain did not exist before we took it. I do not mean this poetically. The maps Hugo carried ceased to agree with the land long before we arrived, and the path itself bent oddly, as though deciding where it wished to be from one mile to the next. From a distance, three mountains rise behind the town—sharp, towering things, their peaks catching the sun in such a way that they appear aflame at dawn and dusk. They dominate the horizon, impossible to ignore, and yet no one here will speak their names.
The forest surrounding the town is unlike any I have known. It is dense, yes, but that is not the strangeness of it. Rivers run where no sensible geography would place them. Trees grow too close together, as if conspiring. The air itself feels… arranged. I have the persistent sense of being somewhere adjacent to the world rather than fully inside it, like a room built too close to another and sharing its walls.
Forgive me, my love. The longer I have gone without word from you, the more restless I have become. I stay with Hugo's family, kind people who offer generosity without questions they know better than to ask. Hugo himself left in February, bound back for London with a haste that surprised even him. He urged me to come with him. I declined. That alone should tell you how deeply this place has taken hold of my thoughts.
Mystic Falls is rich with tradition—so rich it feels weighted by it. Customs govern everything from meals to mourning, and many of them are observed with a seriousness that borders on reverence. Most striking of all is the fear of the mountains. It is forbidden to enter the forests that lead toward them. More than forbidden—it is unspoken. To mention the mountains is to invite silence. To ask about them is to be gently, firmly redirected.
When someone goes into the woods and does not return, no search is organized. No questions are asked. A funeral is prepared at once, even when the lost is a child. I watched this happen once. The speed of it unsettled me more than grief would have. It was as though the town had practiced the ritual too many times to feel surprise.
Yet for all this, Mystic Falls is no small settlement. It is, in fact, quite large—and astonishingly intimate. Everyone knows everyone else, or at least pretends to. Names pass from mouth to mouth with ease. Stories travel faster than footsteps. I cannot help but think how impossible such closeness would be in London, or even in the quieter cities of England and Wales you know so well. There, anonymity is a kind of armor. Here, it does not exist.
I have been dreaming, Julie. Strange dreams. A garden I do not recognize, enclosed by high stone walls, and beyond it a castle so large it seems to press against the sky. I wake unsettled, though I cannot say why. It is likely nothing more than homesickness dressed up as imagination. A man of leisure, far from the comforts he has always known, invents grandeur to soothe himself. I smile at the thought even as I write it.
There is so much more I wish to tell you—details, impressions, questions that multiply the longer I stay—but paper and ink are not easily come by here, and I must be careful not to waste either. If there is a way to send this, I will find it. If not, I will write again all the same.
Think of me kindly. I think of you constantly.
Yours, across all distances,
Carter Augustine Winghelm
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Letter V
Mystic Falls, July 24th, 1768
My dearest Julie,
Sorrow and joy meet in my pen as I write to you—sorrow for my silence, joy that you may read this at all. Forgive me, forgive me endlessly, for what I am about to confess.
Against every warning, every plea from Hugo's family and the neighbors, I ventured into the forest. I saw… something. I cannot name it. Perhaps I do not wish to. It was a nightmare made flesh and shadow, and even now, the memory is too grotesque for words. I cannot describe it; I am too frightened to try. Tell me, my love—do you believe in fairytales?
Mystic Falls proves stranger with each passing day. July has brought a new terror: children disappearing, not singly but in numbers that would rattle any mind. And yet, the town does nothing beyond noting the absence. It is as though such things are to be endured rather than solved. I have the sense—no, the certainty—that everyone here hides something from me. Whether for my safety or some other reason, I will discover it.
Even in sleep, the forest follows me. A voice, faint and fractured, murmurs in my dreams. Its words crack like ice on water; I cannot hold them. Perhaps it is the stress, the fear, the isolation, or the impossibility of writing to you and receiving your letters. Still, the voice persists. And I miss your letters terribly.
Yours, trembling and steadfast,
Carter Augustine Winghelm
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Letter VI
Mystic Falls, November 24th, 1768
My beloved Juliette,
I must apologize once more. November finds me restless and certain that you have worried over my prolonged silence. Such a lapse shall not repeat itself, I promise.
I have discovered a book here that seems infinite, its pages turning without end, and with it, the boundaries of my understanding shift. My ideas of the supernatural—those I once held as quaint curiosities—are transforming. I do not yet know how to explain what I have seen or heard, but I shall, when the truths have fully revealed themselves.
In my dreams, I have met a stranger. A most unusual person. At first, I believed this was only imagination, conjured from isolation and fevered thought. Yet the stranger has begun to show me—slowly, carefully—the secrets of Mystic Falls, and I cannot dismiss them as mere fancy.
Ever yours,
Carter Augustine Winghelm