The Record Keeper: Seraphine's Journal

By Seren Vael

I have been keeping records for two thousand years. I know the difference between a document that tells the truth and one that arranges itself around the truth while leaving the truth itself outside in the cold.
This is the second kind, in places. I am telling you that at the outset.
In October, a twenty-year-old hunter from Edinburgh walked into our mountain with one of our dead placed at the foot of the throne. Green eyes. No fear. A complete, structural absence of it - the kind that is not performed and cannot be manufactured and can only be the result of someone who has already done the interior work of this moment long before arriving at it.
His name was Ian Calloway. His parents had been killed when he was fourteen. He had spent six years building toward the truth of why, with the methodical patience of someone who had started at the bottom of a structure and intended to arrive at the top.
He arrived at us.
My name is Seraphine. I have been the intelligence officer for the First Council - the governing body of the vampire world, which exists beneath the surface of the human one the way a river system exists beneath rock - for sixteen hundred years. I manage the records. I build the pictures. I know what a pattern looks like before it has finished forming, and I knew, from the moment I watched him from the doorway that October night, that something was beginning.
I did not know yet that I was in it.
This is the account of the year Ian Calloway changed the shape of what we were. It is also the account of Vanessa of the Old Blood - four thousand eight hundred years old, the founder of the First Council, the most extraordinary person I have known in two thousand years of knowing people - and what happened when something arrived that she had not prepared for.
And it is the account of a bloodline that had been building toward a single generation for three centuries. Of a contact event on a frozen Finnish lake in November. Of an entity that has been watching the forming events for longer than our entire observational record. Of twelve letters from a mother who knew what her son was and spent her life building him the instrument to find it.
And of me. Who kept the records. Who noted everything in the private account alongside the official one. Who managed the professional and the personal simultaneously and let neither consume the other.
Who was in the story, in the end.
I have tried to write it the way it happened. The places where I failed, where my own involvement bends the telling, I have left in rather than smoothed over.
You deserve the distortion. It is part of the truth.
Begin.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0GVR5X2Y5
• ISBN13: 9798254553267
• Release Date: April 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 136 Pages
• Weight: 0.42 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.0" x 9.0"