admemoriam | history

Noah Czerny was born in the late 1980s to a wealthy Virginia family. One of three lovely, privileged children, he grew up without the need to worry about his future or his fortune. He was gifted with a carefree, lackadaisical childhood in the warm countryside, and as his teenage years arrived and he entered the illustrious Aglionby Academy for high school, nothing seemed destined to change. He grew into a cheerful, benevolent troublemaker, always getting speeding tickets or raiding his parents’ liquor cabinet, but eternally brimming with excited ideas. He spent most of his boundless energy, however, trotting around the countryside with his best friend, Barrington Whelk.

Whelk was the son of a disgraced businessman, who had lost everything in the fallout from his latest scandal. Reduced to a violently plebeian lifestyle, the boy had set his eyes on a fairytale treasure in the hills of Henrietta, Virginia - the favor of a sleeping king, Owen Glendower - and dragged Noah Czerny along in the hunt. It would require locating and waking a ley line, a sort of magical highway that crossed through the continent. Loyal to a fault, Noah was happy to follow his roommate around, despite a lack of any personal interest in the ley line. What he didn’t know was that he would play a very large part in Whelk’s attempt to wake the line - he was going to be the required sacrifice.

One day in 2005, the two boys headed out to the forest in Noah’s red Mustang, and Whelk enacted his plan. Using Noah’s own skateboard as a weapon, he beat his best friend to death. It took eleven minutes, and afterwards, Whelk left Noah's body right there in the woods, along with his car.

No one would find him for seven years. As for the ley line, it did not wake up. Killing Noah had not been a sufficient sacrifice - he had mattered too little to Whelk. What he didn’t know was that he had mattered very much to a 10-year-old boy many, many miles away, standing on that same ley line. Richard Gansey III, chubby-cheeked and wide-eyed, was stung to death by hornets behind his family’s home, at the same moment as Noah’s murder. A mysterious force gave the child’s life back, and whispered in his ear: “You will live because of Glendower. Someone else on the ley line is dying when they should not, and so you will live when you should not.”

While Noah’s family and classmates mourned his mysterious disappearance, he spent the first few years of his afterlife drifting about Henrietta as a ghost, a side effect of his bones still resting undiscovered on the ley line. His little sisters grew up, his murderer went on to become a Latin teacher at Aglionby, and he remained dead and invisible to the world. Then, something magnificent happened - he made friends. Richard Gansey III, very much alive, came to Henrietta in his own hunt for the mysterious Welsh king, and he and his posse of Raven Boys did not seem to care (read: know) that Noah was a quite deceased. They allowed him to move into their loft apartment, Monmouth, which he happily haunted, and never called attention to his unusual habits, such as not sleeping or eating or attending class. If he occasionally disappeared in the middle of a conversation, or floated through a wall by accident, no one ever said anything. It was idyllic, as far as post-murder living situations go, and Noah quickly grew very attached to Gansey and his crew, Ronan and Adam.

In 2012, a not-psychic named Blue Sargent took all of their lives (and afterlife) by storm when she waited on their table at a local pizza joint. Noah’s affection towards Blue was immediate, and not for the same reason as his friends - while Blue had no psychic abilities of her own, she was able to amplify the power of those around her, and that included Noah’s spiritual presence. He latched onto her power like it was the sun. Around Blue, he was able to feel more stable and strong, more like a real boy instead of a fading smudge of a ghost. He would play with her hair and joke around like a sibling, and the two were fast and easy friends.

This band of five took up Gansey’s continued quest to find Glendower, spending most of their days traversing the countryside of Virginia and exploring Cabeswater, the dream forest where time stood still. Then, in their exploration, Gansey and Blue made a horrific discovery - Noah’s skeleton. The secret was out, and he shied away at his friends’ horror, becoming something frightening and incorporeal over the next weeks. His remains were removed from the ley line by the police, leaving him unable to keep form as his friends woke the ley line and confronted Barrington Whelk, avenging Noah at last. After his funeral, the boys and Blue dug Noah’s bones back up, re-burying them on the line so that he could return to his full strength. Things went back to normal - for a little while.

With the ley line awake and fluctuating, Noah’s presence was at its whims. He would disappear for periods of times, just going away, leaving snow globes smashed and friends confused. He took up the hobby of re-enacting his eleven minutes of death, occasionally in the presence of distraught friends. Anything that affected the ley line and Cabeswater, such as Ronan Lynch’s unusual habit of bringing his dreams to life, made it harder for Noah to stay corporeal, and he spent much of the summer sliding in and out of existence while his friends dealt with dream-thieving punks and misguided hit men. By the time summer came to a close, it was clear something was dramatically wrong with him.

On the first day of school, Noah accompanied Blue to a meeting with the school counselor, and went full poltergeist on the poor woman’s office. He later gave Monmouth the same treatment, until Blue forcibly disconnected him from her power, and he had to admit the real source of his tantrums - he could feel himself decaying. He was becoming less himself, and more dead, a change noticed by all of his friends. He managed to get mildly possessed while on an outing with Blue, terrifying her for a third time, and was beginning to become visibly ashamed of his friends’ reactions to him.

Over the next weeks he struggled to maintain the front his friends had come to expect, but even his physical appearance had started decaying. His soul was still bound to Cabeswater, but a demon had taken root, poisoning everything tied to the ley line. It called itself the Unmaker, and on one grim night it got its teeth in deep enough to possess him into attacking Blue, nearly costing her an eye.

It’s from this moment, with Noah just a scrap of a soul tangled around a devastated dead boy, that he’ll be pulled into the game.