Daraquessa

Firstly, shoutout to @acedit-rollswithit. Their grimoire breakdown and analysis saved me many hours of back and forth checking. And despite neither of us getting anywhere with the code, it was super helpful. And im sure it will come up again, don’t worry. FIRST UP: the book.

As figured out before I even watched the episode, people figured out the website title translates to "fear the dark young" through the ASCII code (thanks aced for the correction!). I then applied the A1Z26 cipher to the book itself.For those who don’t know, this simply means every number corresponds to a letter of the english alphabet, with a being 1, b being 2, etc. I used this logic and tried to apply it to the roman numerals in the corners of the pages but to no avail. I even tried caesar ciphering it, which just means shifting the corresponding number/letter backwards or forwards in the alphabet, but none of the codes worked with what I was doing. Over half of my theory time was spent trying different combinations of the roman numerals, different ciphers, etc, but with no results yet. Tried using the numerals as page directions, but either that’s the wrong approach or my page numbers were missing something. Again, @acedit-rollswithitdid better than me at explaining this and went into more detail.

Before I gave up on the roman numerals and admitted we probably didn’t have enough info, I looked through the video. Maybe im hallucinating, but I don’t think we have all of the pages of the book, or we're missing some sort of info. From 28:28 onwards in 2.3, it looks like there are perhaps more pages? Judging by text shape on the last few pages that we were given, I can align them to the video, but they keep examining the book for a few pages after ours has finished.

Breaking the meta even more now, as im writing this, the book website is inaccessible and down (I printed it out weeks ago like a nerd so it doesn’t affect me lol). Coincidence? Possibly. Are they editing the website and updating it for the release tomorrow?  Adding more content? Probably. :)

I think the jabberwok poem at the start of the book is the poem deemed important to mr abrams, I cant remember the timestamp but its mentioned that a poem of significance is required for the ritual. I believe this jabberwok poem is the poem important to him, or more specifically, important to his son. It was probably his son's favourite poem, being a work of lewis carrol, and I can imagine bizly is definitely evil enough to make me empathise for this man even more. He was just a father reading lewis carrol's stories to his son, and his son loved the nonsense one, because of course he did.

In my first theory post I talked about runes, and now its come full circle! In episode 4 theyre definitely performing the ritual to banish the dark young, which requires the placement of runes. Now we know now that the specific order is in the book, and that the salt around it is a component of the ritual. How do they get elder blood, the other component to banish the dark young? All of the options are pretty dangerous - either they find where ms abrams blood went, if it wasn’t fully used in the previous ritual ; they somehow procure mr abrams blood ; or they use another older person. Unfortunately, if it is the latter, it is likely to be ms wisp, my goat, because why else is she confusedly in the hospital in the instagram teaser.

 Speaking of the insta teaser, william is said to have an issue with his eye - which is NOT a component of the ritual to banish the dark young. Either he himself sacrifices it to gain some advantage, eg, ability to calm during the ritual, or to save someone - or its taken from him, as eyes are a big thing in this series and everyone seems to target them both physically and magically.

Bella Brooks. My baby. I believe she was the first one Mr Abrams took, and something happened to her that wasn't simply becoming a returned. Not only does the first one taken by the rider in the ep2.2 story "The Witch of Heidendorf" match the description of a young girl, but the fact that the girl's father was punished also aligns. If she was a returned, then why had her room been empty for months? why did she disappear after the ritual in the woods while Lui's grandmother was reportedly still sleeping at home? They also didn’t have to roll occult, but that’s not definitive proof as none of them asked to around her.

Another thought about bella I had was perhaps she was the patient in the hospital that the fleetwoods were performing surgery on, but im unsure about this. If this was true, her stuff would not be gone, and her mum would hopefully be in the hospital with her, not at home.

Mr Abrams is still alive in some capacity. Lowkey he's giving insanity, like even more than before. The bloody footprints he left behind are his or his wife's blood, and either he barely escaped the dark young below the ground and got injured, or the more likely, he was performing another ritual. One that comes to mind is the enhancing of senses ritual mentioned in the book, p25, in which the person has to bathe in blood. Fun.

THE DARK YOUNG.

In the session, its theorised (probably very correctly given the book) that the dark young are a consequence of the failed ritual. They use the lit path opened during the ritual supposed to guide the dead back as their own, and walk the path instead and are summoned into the world.

I then researched the dark young, as it's in the call of cthulhu mythos, and holy shit I cant BELIEVE I didn’t research it earlier. While Bizly has obviously taken some creative liberties with their visual design and overall character, the dark young are still an established lovecraftian canon, first named in HP Lovecraft's "The Whisper in the Darkness", and appear in many other instances within that canon universe. "The Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath" are, as the name suggests, the offspring of an outer god known as Shub-Niggurath (who is also referred to as the "goat with a thousand young").The dark young serve as proxies to Shub-Niggurath, apparently appearing where her cult is active, accepting sacrifices for her, perpetuating her worship, and DEVOURING NON-CULTISTS.

Since literally episode 1 I've been convinced that Mr Abrams has been worshipping something else entirely, which is giving him his power, because there's just no way that a) he can find and cast dark magic runes by himself, and  b) christian god is canon and accepting child sacrifices. Shub-Niggurath fills this gap in theory almost perfectly. Not only does fire not work on both the returned (known via ep2.1 poem) AND the dark young (call of cthulhu  monsters compendium ), but it would explain how mr abrams survived the ritual and the dark young - because he was a cultist, be it unknowingly.

This would also make sense as the trees are likely very connected, as evidenced twice. Firstly in episode 2.2, bizly describes what in hindsight was probably heavy foreshadowing, the tree william is investigating as jagged "as if connecting to the rest of the forest". In 2.3, the trees shake more violently as the group (specifically william) approaches, as if signalling - and the gang determines that it might be a collective recognition of a threat in the form of 3 teenagers. And while we can't necessarily trust the descriptions during norah's bout of madness, it is also evident in there that the entire forest is alive and working together to seemingly restrain or kill her.

In mega summary, we're missing pages of the book and yet to crack the code. The gang's gonna have to source an old person's blood, mr abrams included the jabberwok poem because it was his son's favourite,  bella was the first, and william's gonna have his eye sacrificed or taken. Oh and mr abrams is actually probably worshipping Shub-Niggurath, mother of the dark young and likely the source of all the magic and rituals in the book.

I'm thinking about doing a video essay on all this, once the last epsiode comes out, I can get all my mythology and references right. Ive never even theorised for a fandom before UPP, but hey, I just loved this show too much, and I guess this is my way of appreciating it. Thanks for reading this stupidly long post :)