Isaac Wright, Isis’s older half-brother, was 15 years older than her but despite this they have always been extremely close, especially after the death of Isis’s father and mother in a car crash. He had long supported her financially via his work at the Wickerby, Driftwood, and Ember wandworks, enabling her to attend an expensive Montessori school a few hours away.

Eventually, however, Isaac began to be taken into the confidence of Obadiah Driftwood, the factory foreman, and Cyrus Ember, the school principal. As he had proved himself exceptionally able, he was used in a scheme that was intended to cut the third owner out of the wandworks, Elijah Wickerby, who was largely disengaged from the daily working of the place. Isaac earned a considerable sum of money–paid in gold–for this assistance, and was able to stop working on the literally soul-sucking mock assembly line, but he was greatly disturbed by the revelation of how the wandworks was operated, and by the fact that the quality and expense of a wand, rather than the skill of the person using it, was the deciding factor in their magical aptitude.

Isaac put into place a plan for ending what he saw as an inhuman charade. First, he began documenting the true inner workings of the factory in a series of notes, which he hid throughout the campus. Then, using his official position as a janitor, he began to secretly copy files at night using a stolen wand. Finally, he presented his findings–and the plot against him–to Elijah Wickerby, intending to turn Wickerby against the other two while blackmailing him into going along with a plan to wind down factory operations.

Instead, Wickerby reported the contact to his partners, who immediately put aside their plans for Wickerby and conspired to murder Isaac. While they succeeded in luring him into a killing zone under false pretenses, a running battle ensued leading not to a quiet death in the factory, as the men had hoped, but a loud and public one in the school. Even though the Davis police were able to squelch any serious investigation, ruling the case a tragic accident, enough information reached his sister that she began planning to avenge him, using the large amount of money he left to her in a living will to fund it.