⚠️SPOILERS AHEAD⚠️

This is a novel I have not yet written. I don't have it completely fleshed out yet. When I have more details to add, this page will be an even more massive spoiler than it already is.

Soror Mystica is the sequel to Ancilla. It is the second book in my Magnum Opus trilogy and takes place mostly in England, although some of the action will happen in the United States. 

In Ancilla, we see the protagonist discover herself, only to wrestle with the trauma of her religious upbringing and the way her abusive parents disowned her. She ultimately loses the wrestling match as a result of some seriously unhealthy coping mechanisms and then, to top it all off, loses her husband mere weeks after marrying him. 

Does she learn anything from all that?

Well...

Flash forward to the year 1998. The protagonist whilom known as "ancilla" has graduated summa cum laude from Case Western University with a combined BA/MA in English and is getting ready to start her graduate studies at the University of Oxford. Because I intend to structure this second book in the series on the alchemical process, she will be reading alchemy with a tutor in the Faculty of Philosophy. She will get the standard combo of an M.St (basically, How To Write A Thesis and How To Buy Yourself Time To Find Someone To Supervise Your Thesis) and a D.Phil, all of which takes roughly four to four and a half years.

Her sub, "zed," already graduated from Case Western Reserve University with a combined BA/MA in History in 1997. He is doing his doctoral work at Ohio State University (which even back then was a "public Ivy") and the two of them have a long-distance open relationship. 

This works well enough for both of them because neither of them are monogamous.

The protagonist met a woman during her study-abroad term and hit it off with her. Because of the woman's self-proclaimed identification with the character Ophelia in Hamlet, she nicknamed the woman "Ophelia." "Ophelia" is an artist who lives in a cheap bedsit in the trendy Oxford neighborhood of Jericho, which is where she has her studio. She and the protagonist lost touch when the protagonist's study abroad term ended, and when the protagonist comes back to Oxford to do her graduate studies, she discovers that "Ophelia" has started dating another man...

For the first time in her life, the protagonist feels pangs of jealousy.

She deals with it by getting involved with "Ophelia's" boyfriend, figuring if you can't beat them, you might as well join them. (This will have predictably disastrous results). 

Oh, it gets even more complicated. 

The protagonist's best friend is "Philo." "Philo" is someone she met at a party that she got dragged to. "Philo" is going for his D.Phil in Linguistics, specializing in philology (the thing Tolkien studied and taught - and like Tolkien, his area of research is medieval Scandinavian languages). He already has two degrees in Linguistics and Music (specialty: music history). He's approximately seven feet tall, has flaming red hair and weird chartreuse-green eyes that almost seem to glow in the right light, is as thin as a wendigo, and as you might surmise from these classic markers, he's another vampire. Like the protagonist, his element is Fire. He gets to break it to her that the chronic illness and depression she suffers when she doesn't hook up with someone and siphon off their energy is a result of her vampirism. He also gets to teach her how to feed properly. 

"Philo" is going to develop a thing for "zed" when "zed" comes up on his next visit to Oxford...

The plot of Soror Mystica is going to involve two things:

1. The protagonist's continued quest for gnostic enlightenment.

2. A massively complicated, angsty, melodramatic, sadomasochistic, polyamorous love dodecahedron. 

Somewhere in the middle of the book, "zed" is going to marry his American girlfriend, who is a woman that is perfectly compatible with him in nearly every way except for being completely vanilla. (It's a good thing she's not the jealous type). They will be marrying on the grounds of "Philo's" ancestral estate. Did I mention "Philo" is also entitled? I haven't decided whether to make him a baron or a marquess. I'm kind of leaning toward baron because George Gordon, Lord Byron was a baron. On the other hand, it's amusing to hear people mispronounce the word marquess.

This book will end when the protagonist's graduate studies are over. Also after she asks "Philo" to lead her on a vision quest that goes spectacularly badly and leaves the two of them permanently psychically linked to a degree they both find annoying.