Of all the cards in The Black Bird Oracle, The Alchemical Wedding may be the one that feels most obviously connected to Diana and Matthew.

The guidebook gives us:

Harmony. Opposites. Attraction.

And anyone who has read A Discovery of Witches knows how easily those words fit.

A witch and a vampire. Warmblood and coldblood. Scholar and scientist. Two creatures who have been taught that relationships like theirs are forbidden, falling in love anyway.

It would be very easy to stop there.

But the more I thought about The Alchemical Wedding, the less interested I became in Diana and Matthew as a love story and the more interested I became in what their relationship does.

Because relationships in All Souls rarely affect only the two people involved.

They disrupt families.

They challenge laws.

They expose prejudices.

They create new alliances.

And sometimes they change what everyone around them believes is possible.

That makes Diana and Matthew’s relationship much more than a romance.

Their decision to be together forces almost every major structure in their world to respond. The de Clermont family has to make room for Diana. The Bishops have to make room for Matthew. The Congregation has to confront a relationship prohibited by the Covenant. And eventually their children force creatures to reconsider assumptions about the boundaries separating witches, vampires, and daemons.

Their union doesn’t simply combine two people.

It creates something that didn’t exist before.

That is, of course, one of the central ideas of alchemy.

Transformation isn’t simply about putting two substances next to each other. The interesting part is what happens when their interaction produces something new.

And once I started looking at relationships in All Souls that way, Diana and Matthew stopped being the only interesting example.

Consider Marcus and Phoebe.

Their relationship begins in a very different world from Matthew and Diana’s. Marcus belongs to an ancient vampire family but is continually drawn toward change. Phoebe enters that world from the outside and makes the extraordinary decision to become a vampire herself.

But Phoebe doesn’t simply disappear into Marcus’s identity.

She brings her own intelligence, judgment, professional experience, and sense of self into the relationship. Their partnership asks a question that is different from Diana and Matthew’s but just as important: How do you join an ancient family without allowing its history to determine who you become?

Marcus and Phoebe represent something the de Clermont family desperately needs.

A future that isn’t simply a reproduction of its past.

Then there are Nathaniel and Sophie.

Their relationship may be quieter, but in some ways it is even more radical.

A daemon and a witch create a family together despite the divisions that have governed creatures for generations. Sophie’s connection to the Bishop family further complicates everything creatures believe they know about inheritance and identity.

Long before anyone fully understands the science behind creature relationships, Nathaniel and Sophie are already living the contradiction.

Their family exists.

Reality arrives before the rules are ready for it.

And then there is Hugh and Fernando.

Their story changes the question again.

Hugh and Fernando remind us that sometimes the problem isn’t whether two people belong together.

It’s whether the world around them is willing to recognize that they do.

Fernando’s place within the de Clermont family exposes the limits of structures that claim to protect families while failing to recognize relationships that don’t fit comfortably within their rules.

His love for Hugh isn’t less real because an institution failed to honor it.

If anything, the persistence of that love makes the institution look inadequate.

And suddenly The Alchemical Wedding begins to feel like something much larger than a marriage card.

It becomes a card about what happens when two people create a relationship that challenges the categories around them.

Diana and Matthew challenge the separation of species.

Marcus and Phoebe challenge the idea that joining an ancient family requires simply accepting its traditions.

Nathaniel and Sophie challenge assumptions about creature identity and inheritance.

Hugh and Fernando challenge the boundaries of which relationships are allowed to count as family.

Different couples.

Different circumstances.

But the same underlying idea.

A relationship can change more than the people inside it.

Perhaps that’s what Deborah Harkness has been exploring all along.

Love in All Souls is rarely passive. It rearranges things.

It forces families to expand their definitions of belonging. It exposes rules that no longer make sense. It creates children, alliances, loyalties, and possibilities that couldn’t have existed before.

That’s transformation.

And maybe that’s why The Alchemical Wedding belongs so naturally in this world.

The real magic isn’t that two opposites find one another.

It’s what becomes possible after they do.

Your Draw

Which relationship in All Souls do you think changed the world around it the most—and was that change something the couple intended, or simply the consequence of choosing each other?

The Skeleton is one of the least mysterious cards in The Black Bird Oracle—at least at first glance.

Deborah Harkness gives it three words:

Building. Structure. Support.

A skeleton is what remains when everything else is stripped away. It gives the body its shape, supports everything built around it, and allows the whole to keep standing.

That made me think immediately about the de Clermonts.

They are one of the great families of All Souls, but they aren’t exactly a conventional one. They span thousands of years. Their members aren’t connected by blood alone. Some were born into the family, others were made vampires and brought into it. There are marriages, matings, adoptions, branches, alliances, old resentments, enormous loyalties, and disagreements that can last for centuries.

Philippe built something extraordinary.

But after Philippe is gone, what actually holds it together?

The obvious answer might be Baldwin.

As Philippe’s surviving son and head of the family, Baldwin inherits much of the responsibility for maintaining the structure Philippe created. He takes that responsibility seriously—sometimes so seriously that the rest of the family experiences his protection as control.

Baldwin believes rules matter. Hierarchy matters. Obligations matter. Someone has to protect the family’s interests even when doing so makes that person unpopular.

In that sense, Baldwin behaves very much like a skeleton. He is rigid because he believes rigidity is what keeps the structure standing.

But a skeleton isn’t enough to make a family.

Which brings me to Ysabeau.

If Baldwin provides structure, Ysabeau provides something different: continuity.

She remembers.

She knew Philippe not as a legendary patriarch but as her mate. She remembers the people who have disappeared from the family, the relationships that changed, the mistakes that were made, and the histories younger members know only as stories.

Sept-Tours itself seems to embody that role. People leave. They return. New members arrive. Relationships change. Yet Ysabeau remains, connecting the family that exists now to the one Philippe once knew.

Her authority doesn’t come from a title.

It comes from memory.

Then there is Fernando.

Fernando is particularly interesting because he exposes one of the weaknesses in the structure Philippe created.

He loved Hugh. He was Hugh’s mate. He belongs to the family emotionally and historically, yet the rules governing creatures prevented that relationship from being recognized in the way it deserved.

And still Fernando remains connected to the de Clermonts.

That makes him important.

Families often reveal what they truly value not through the people who fit comfortably within their structure, but through the people the structure wasn’t designed to accommodate.

Fernando forces us to ask whether belonging is determined by rules—or by relationships.

Marcus raises the same question from another direction.

Marcus inherits the de Clermont family through Matthew, but he doesn’t simply reproduce it. He creates new relationships and new communities, and his choices repeatedly challenge the idea that preserving a family means keeping it exactly as it was.

That may be one of the biggest tensions running through the de Clermont story.

Baldwin’s instinct is often to preserve.

Marcus’s is often to change.

Both believe they are protecting something important.

And perhaps both are necessary.

A skeleton provides structure, but living bodies aren’t rigid. Joints bend. Bones grow. Old tissue is constantly replaced. A structure that cannot adapt eventually becomes something very different from support.

It becomes a cage.

That may be the most interesting way to think about the de Clermont family.

Philippe created the original structure, but he isn’t what keeps it alive centuries later. Baldwin provides order. Ysabeau provides memory. Fernando reminds the family that love can exist beyond the boundaries its rules once recognized. Marcus pushes those boundaries outward and asks what the family might become next.

And there are others doing the same thing.

Phoebe chooses to enter this complicated family. Jack finds his way back into it. Miriam and other longtime allies occupy spaces that blur the distinction between family and friendship. New generations arrive who will inherit the de Clermont name without necessarily inheriting all of its assumptions.

The family survives because its structure is strong.

But it survives just as importantly because that structure can change.

Maybe that’s what The Skeleton makes visible.

When everything else is stripped away—the titles, the bloodlines, the rules, even Philippe himself—the de Clermonts aren’t held together by one person.

They’re held together by the accumulated choices of people who continue, despite everything, to claim one another as family.

Your Draw

If Philippe created the de Clermont family, who do you think has done the most to keep it together since his death—and is that the same person who has done the most to help it change?

The Loom is one of those cards in The Black Bird Oracle that immediately feels at home in the world Deborah Harkness has created.

Its ideas are fate, time, and destiny—three things that seem to follow Diana Bishop from the moment she calls Ashmole 782 from the Bodleian stacks.

It would be easy to look at Diana’s life and conclude that much of it was destined to happen. She is born into two remarkable magical families. She unknowingly possesses extraordinary abilities. She calls up a manuscript that other creatures have been searching for for centuries. She meets Matthew. She timewalks. She discovers the Book of Life. Eventually, she becomes central to changing a system that has governed creatures for generations.

Viewed from a distance, the pattern looks almost too perfect to be accidental.

But The Loom made me wonder whether All Souls is really a story about destiny at all.

Maybe it’s a story about people creating the conditions that allow someone else’s future to happen.

And if that’s true, there are far more hands on the loom than we might initially think.

Philippe is perhaps the most obvious.

He spends centuries thinking ahead, building alliances, strengthening the de Clermont family, and making decisions whose consequences extend far beyond his own lifetime. Even after his death, choices Philippe made continue to shape Matthew, Baldwin, Ysabeau, and eventually Diana.

Philippe understands something that few other characters do as well: you don’t have to live to see the final pattern in order to influence it.

But Philippe isn’t the only one weaving.

Rebecca Bishop and Stephen Proctor make decisions that shape Diana’s life long before she is capable of understanding them. They know their daughter is unusual. They understand that forces surrounding her could become dangerous, and their attempts to protect her affect Diana long after they are gone.

That protection comes with consequences.

Diana grows up believing that avoiding magic is a choice she made entirely for herself. Only later does she begin to understand how much of her relationship with magic was shaped by decisions made by her parents.

That raises an uncomfortable question: When someone changes the course of your life to protect you, is that fate—or is it simply someone else pulling a thread?

Then there are Sarah and Emily.

I think they’re particularly interesting through the lens of The Loom because their influence is quieter.

They don’t determine Diana’s future. They do something perhaps more important: they give her a place from which she can eventually choose it.

After Rebecca and Stephen die, Sarah and Emily raise Diana. They give her a family, preserve her connection to the Bishop line, and allow her to become a scholar even when that means watching her distance herself from magic.

They don’t force Diana toward the person she will become.

They keep enough threads intact for her to find her own way back.

And that distinction matters.

Because by the time we reach the later books, Diana is no longer simply living inside a pattern created by other people.

She begins weaving.

Her marriage to Matthew changes both the Bishop and de Clermont families. Their children challenge assumptions about what creatures can be. Diana’s discoveries about the Book of Life alter what creatures understand about themselves, while her willingness to confront the Congregation challenges rules that have governed their world for centuries.

The woman whose life was shaped so profoundly by other people’s choices eventually begins making choices that will shape lives she may never know.

That feels much more interesting to me than destiny.

It also makes me think differently about timewalking.

Diana can literally move through time, but even she cannot move through it without consequences. The past isn’t a place she can simply visit and leave untouched. Relationships are created there. Knowledge travels back with her. Choices made centuries earlier become part of the future.

Time in All Souls doesn’t behave like a straight line.

It looks much more like fabric.

Threads cross. Some disappear beneath the surface and emerge much later. One person’s choices become part of another person’s story, sometimes generations before those people ever meet.

And perhaps that’s what The Loom makes visible.

No single character is sitting above the story controlling everything.

Not Philippe.

Not Rebecca and Stephen.

Not Diana.

Instead, each inherits threads from the people who came before and adds something of their own before passing them forward.

That may be one of the most beautiful ideas running through All Souls: we are shaped by people whose choices we didn’t make, but we aren’t trapped by the pattern they began.

Eventually, the thread reaches our hands.

And we get to decide what happens next.

Your Draw

Who do you think quietly changes the course of the All Souls story more than anyone realizes?

Not necessarily the most powerful character or the one at the center of the story. Think about the person whose choices send threads outward—and change what becomes possible for everyone who comes after.

Personal baggage. The unknown.

The idea of personal baggage immediately made me think about All Souls, because almost no one enters Deborah Harkness’s world carrying only the life they chose for themselves. Her characters inherit families, abilities, expectations, old wounds, secrets, responsibilities, and sometimes consequences created generations before they were born.

The question isn’t whether they have baggage. It’s what they decide to do with it.

Matthew may be the clearest example.

Long before Diana enters his life, Matthew is carrying things he didn’t choose. There are Philippe’s expectations and the complicated responsibilities of being a de Clermont, but there is also something far more personal: his blood rage.

Matthew inherited it.

He didn’t choose the condition, but he has spent centuries living with the consequences of having it. His fear of what he might do becomes part of how he understands himself, and the guilt attached to his past becomes something he continues to carry even when the people who love him see far more in him than his worst moments.

Matthew’s box contains inheritance and guilt tangled so tightly together that he sometimes struggles to distinguish between them.

Sarah Bishop carries something very different.

When we first meet Sarah, she’s one of the people who taught Diana what family could look like after the deaths of Rebecca and Stephen. She and Emily step into a life that was changed by tragedy and help raise a child whose magical abilities, and refusal to use them, come with questions no one can easily answer.

But Sarah also carries the history of the Bishop family itself.

She knows what it means to come from a family of witches. She understands its traditions, its expectations, and some of its wounds. Unlike Diana, she doesn’t try to close the door on that inheritance. She lives inside it.

What makes Sarah interesting is that she doesn’t carry the past quietly. She argues with it. She protects it. She questions it. And when circumstances force her to reconsider things she thought she understood about her own family, she has to decide which beliefs still deserve a place in the box.

Marcus inherits another kind of burden.

He becomes a vampire because Matthew makes him one, bringing him into a family whose history began thousands of years before Marcus was born. Suddenly he belongs to the de Clermonts, but he didn’t grow up with their rules, their grudges, or their understanding of what family requires.

In some ways, that makes Marcus one of the most interesting characters through which to examine inheritance.

He receives the family without receiving the childhood that would have taught him how to belong to it.

Over time, Marcus has to decide what being Matthew’s son means, what being a de Clermont means, and which parts of that enormous legacy he wants to carry into his own relationships. His life with Phoebe offers the possibility of doing something different—not rejecting the family, but refusing to assume that everything inherited must remain unchanged.

And then there’s Jack.

Few characters in All Souls have a box packed for them as completely as Jack does.

He begins as a child shaped by abandonment and the brutal realities of Elizabethan London. Diana and Matthew give him a family, only to disappear from his life when they return to their own time. Other people then make choices that alter his future again, leaving Jack to live with consequences he never had the power to choose.

By the time we encounter him again, Jack is carrying centuries of loss, violence, love, loyalty, and confusion.

Yet Jack is never simply the sum of what happened to him.

That’s what makes him so important to this card.

The Box could easily become a metaphor for trauma - the burdens everyone drags behind them. But All Souls is much more interesting than that. Deborah Harkness repeatedly gives her characters inherited histories and then asks what they will do with them.

Matthew doesn’t have to become Philippe.

Marcus doesn’t have to become Matthew.

Diana doesn’t have to become Rebecca.

Jack doesn’t have to remain the person other people tried to make him.

Sarah can honor the Bishops without accepting every belief handed down through the family.

Inheritance matters enormously in All Souls. Bloodlines matter. Families matter. History matters.

But inheritance is rarely destiny.

Maybe that’s the distinction The Box makes me notice most.

We don’t get to choose everything placed inside it. Some things arrive before we’re old enough to understand them. Others are handed to us by parents, families, circumstances, or people who made decisions on our behalf.

Eventually, though, the box becomes ours.

And then we have to decide what we’re going to keep.

Your Draw

Matthew, Sarah, Marcus, and Jack all inherit parts of lives they didn’t choose. Which All Souls character do you think does the best job of deciding what to keep and what to leave behind?

Except Deborah Harkness gives The Mirror three words that make the idea much more interesting:

Revelations. Distortions. Reflections.

The guidebook reminds us that mirrors can reveal, but they can also distort. What we see reflected back at us isn’t necessarily the truth, particularly when our own fears, expectations, and histories influence what we believe we are seeing.

That made me wonder about the characters in All Souls.

If we could take The Mirror out of the deck and place it in front of one of them, who would have the hardest time seeing themselves clearly?

My first answer was Matthew.

Matthew carries an extraordinarily fixed idea of who he is. He sees the violence in his past, his blood rage, the people he has killed, the mistakes he has made, and the danger he believes he represents to the people around him. Even when others see something different in him, Matthew has difficulty letting go of the darkest parts of his own reflection.

Diana sees him differently.

She certainly doesn’t ignore what he is capable of, but she refuses to accept that his worst actions are the entirety of who he is. Again and again, Matthew’s understanding of himself comes into conflict with the man Diana believes him to be.

So what would The Mirror reveal to Matthew?

Would he finally see the person Diana sees, or would his own history continue to distort the reflection?

Then I thought about Diana, and the answer became less obvious.

When we first meet Diana Bishop in A Discovery of Witches, she has constructed a very specific identity for herself. She is a historian. A scholar. A professor. She is someone who works hard, thinks rationally, and has built a life around books, archives, teaching, and research.

She is also a witch who has spent years insisting that being a witch isn’t particularly important to who she is.

Diana’s problem isn’t that she doesn’t know she’s a witch. She knows exactly what she is. Her distortion lies in believing she can separate that part of herself from everything else.

It takes the events surrounding Ashmole 782—and eventually Matthew, Sarah, Emily, Philippe, and others—to force Diana to reconsider the reflection she has created for herself. Becoming more powerful doesn’t turn her into someone new. In many ways, it reveals the person who was there all along.

That makes Diana a very strong candidate for The Mirror.

But then there is Baldwin.

Baldwin is fascinating because I’m not sure his reflection is distorted so much as incomplete.

He sees himself as the person responsible for the survival of the de Clermont family. Philippe’s death leaves Baldwin with obligations that extend far beyond his own desires, and he frequently makes decisions from the position of someone who believes that protecting the family sometimes requires being the person everyone else resents.

The question is whether Baldwin sees the difference between protecting the family and controlling it.

Other members of the de Clermont family certainly do.

Put The Mirror in front of Baldwin and I suspect the most interesting question wouldn’t be whether he likes what he sees. It would be whether the reflection matches the man he believes himself to be.

And then we come to Gallowglass.

Of all these characters, he may be the one I find most difficult to place.

Gallowglass knows who he is remarkably well. He understands his loyalties, his responsibilities, and his feelings. He isn’t hiding from the truth in quite the same way Matthew and Diana sometimes do.

But knowing yourself and building a life for yourself aren’t necessarily the same thing.

So much of Gallowglass’s identity has been shaped by what he does for other people—by loyalty, promises, family, and a love that cannot become the life he might have wanted. Put The Mirror in front of him and I don’t think it would reveal a secret.

It might ask a much harder question:

Who are you when no one needs you?

Perhaps that’s why The Mirror is such an interesting place to begin this series.

There isn’t one character who belongs to this card.

Matthew’s reflection is darkened by guilt.

Diana’s is complicated by the parts of herself she spent years refusing to acknowledge.

Baldwin’s may be shaped by duty.

Gallowglass’s by devotion.

Each of them looks into the same mirror and sees something different because each brings a different history to the glass.

And that feels very All Souls.

Deborah Harkness has never been particularly interested in characters who are exactly what they first appear to be. Historians know better than that. People, like manuscripts, accumulate layers. Some are visible. Others have been erased, rewritten, hidden, or misunderstood.

Sometimes the hardest thing isn’t discovering the truth.

It’s recognizing yourself when you finally see it.

Your Draw

Which All Souls character sees themselves most differently from the way everyone else sees them?

Tell me who would you choose and what you think they’re getting wrong.

Then I spent some time with the actual deck.

I went through the 52 cards, read the guidebook, looked at the illustrations, and paid particular attention to the words Deborah chose to associate with each card. The Mirror is about revelations, distortions, and reflections. The Box holds personal baggage and the unknown. The Loom represents fate, time, and destiny. Blood speaks to deep bonds, the self, and vitality. The Skeleton is about building, structure, and support.

And I realized I didn’t really want to explain any of them.

Deborah has already done that. Duh…right?

What I actually want to do for this series is take a look at what would happen if we took the ideas in these cards and turned them back toward the characters we’ve been reading about for years.

Take The Mirror.

The guidebook asks us to think about what a mirror reveals—and what it can distort. But put that card into the world of All Souls and a much more interesting question appears: Which character has the hardest time seeing themselves clearly?

Is it Matthew, who so often sees himself through the worst things he has done rather than the man Diana sees?

Is it Diana, who spends years believing that magic is something she can simply choose not to be part of?

Is it Baldwin, whose understanding of himself as protector of the de Clermont family doesn’t always match the way the rest of the family experiences him?

Or perhaps Gallowglass, whose loyalty to others has shaped so much of the life he has allowed himself to live?

Suddenly The Mirror isn’t something we’re interpreting.

It’s something we’re using.

And there are 51 more cards waiting for us.

The Box makes me wonder what the characters in All Souls are carrying that was handed to them by someone else.

The Loom raises the question of who is really pulling the threads of fate throughout the series.

The Skeleton makes us look at the de Clermont family and ask what actually holds them together when everything else is stripped away.

The Alchemical Wedding gives us an entirely new way to think about Matthew and Diana’s marriage.

And then there is Blood, which may open one of the biggest questions in the entire series: Is blood destiny in All Souls, or has Deborah Harkness spent seven books showing us that it isn’t?

These are the questions I want to explore.

So this series is going to work a little differently than I originally imagined. What else is new, right?

Each week, we’ll draw one card from the Black Bird Oracle and use it as a way into the world of All Souls. We’ll start with the meaning Deborah gives the card, but we won’t stay there. Instead, we’ll turn it toward the characters, relationships, families, and choices we’ve been following since Diana first called Ashmole 782 from the Bodleian stacks.

Some cards may lead us back to Diana and Matthew. Others may take us to Philippe, Ysabeau, Baldwin, Gallowglass, Sarah, Marcus, Phoebe, Becca, or characters we haven’t thought about in a while. And some may make us reconsider a question we thought the books had already answered.

There are 52 cards in the Black Bird Oracle.

I’m not promising 52 articles. But I love the idea that there are now 52 different doors into a world we already know—and that opening one of them might make us notice something we missed the first time through.

That’s where we’re going next.

And we’re starting with The Mirror.

Your Draw

Before we begin: if you could put The Mirror in front of one All Souls character and ask them to see themselves clearly, who would you choose?

Her manuscripts matter.

Her libraries matter.

Her houses matter.

Nothing in All Souls exists simply to move the plot forward. Objects have histories, previous owners, and stories of their own. Ashmole 782 isn’t memorable because it’s magical. It’s memorable because Deborah Harkness convinces us it existed long before Diana Bishop ever called it from the Bodleian stacks.

That ability to make fictional objects feel historical may be one of her greatest gifts as a writer.

Now she’s doing something she has never done before.

On August 18, The Black Bird Oracle Deck will become the first major object from the All Souls universe to cross from fiction into the real world.

What fascinated me wasn’t simply the announcement of a deck. Although I did jump to get my pre-order in and can’t wait for it to arrive!

It was the idea that an object readers had previously encountered only in fiction would now exist beyond the pages of the novel.

That raised a different question for me.

Why an oracle?

Deborah Harkness is a historian. Her novels are built on real manuscripts, real libraries, real places, and centuries of scholarship. Even the most magical moments in All Souls are grounded in historical traditions. Creating an oracle deck might seem like an unexpected departure.

I suspect it isn’t.

The more I thought about it, the more it felt like a natural extension of everything she has been writing about for nearly twenty years.

Throughout the All Souls series, Deborah Harkness has explored how knowledge survives. Sometimes it survives in manuscripts. Sometimes in libraries. Sometimes in family traditions passed quietly from one generation to the next. Again and again, she reminds us that ideas endure because someone chooses to preserve them.

An oracle deck, in its own way, asks a similar question.

Not What will happen next?

But How do symbols carry meaning across generations?

That’s a question historians ask all the time.

It’s also the question I’d like to explore over the next several weeks.

Rather than reviewing cards or discussing divination, I’d like to look at the history behind the deck. Why have humans organized knowledge through symbols for thousands of years? Why do birds, elements, moon phases, and alchemical imagery continue to appear across cultures? What makes an object feel like an heirloom? And how does Deborah Harkness make something entirely new feel as though it has existed for centuries?

Those questions feel entirely at home in Between the Stacks.

Because what has always interested me most isn’t simply the story Deborah Harkness tells. It’s the depth of historical thinking that makes her fictional world feel so convincingly real.

Perhaps that’s the greatest magic of all.

Not creating something out of nothing. But creating something so deeply rooted in history that it feels as though we simply hadn’t discovered it until now.

I hope you’ll join me!