Ink, and Other Such Important Things

The Witherbloom Archives is not a welcoming place. 

It rests on one of the shattered moons orbiting Raven’s Eye, and the only way to get there is a small ferry that runs twice a day--once in the morning, once in the evening. The ferry is automatic, unmanned, and waits for no one. If you’re late, you’re out of luck until the next run. Unless, of course, you know how to summon it yourself. Very few people do--just Marjorie and her most trusted inner circle. 

The trip up is an hour, and the view is the sprawl of Yestershire and the endless ocean surrounding it. After so many back-and-forths, it’s old news, and the head archivist herself hates it. It’s too open, too wide. She’s not fond of open space, especially not on a boat so small it shifts back and forth with any significant weight. That’s the price of privacy, it seems. She draws her butterfly cloak over her shoulders, pulls the hood over her ears, and keeps her head down. 

When the ferry docks, it’s to an old wooden pier that creaks underfoot, its underside overtaken with moss and vines. A single iron lantern illuminates the way into a terraformed moonscape. Gnarled dark willows guard a winding path to the Archives itself. 

Thick ivy winds up the walls of a tall, austere brick building. The windows are dark, and though there are many of them - each ornately framed - all of them are frosted and impossible to see through. A wrought iron fence stands between the grounds and the Archives itself as if to fend off any intruder.

Admission through the fence requires either a guide or its own token of invitation. Any other attempt at entry will be blocked by the wards.

The double doors are massive, arched, and would require some force to open by hand. In one concession to comfort, Marjorie has made them open automatically to those who have a token of employment. Basil, with his limp noodle arms, is eternally grateful.

Inside the Archives, a literal maze of shelves awaits. They loop in on themselves in impossible ways and open themselves only to people who are able to bypass their various tricks and traps. Very few people in the Celestial Seas are on that list.

Marjorie can count on one hand the people she’s given full access to the whole of the Witherbloom Archives.

1. Herself
2. Agnes
3. Basil

A long time ago, there was another, but she doesn’t like to think about that. The damage done was incalculable.

Basil’s addition to the list came relatively recently, after a good thirty years of service. At some point she had to admit that his work was good enough - that he was trustworthy enough - that it would be useful to have more than two people with access to the most dangerous magical artifacts that these halls contained, lest something go wrong -

Her trust is a slow, brittle thing, and he had already lost it once. He’s lucky she didn’t fire him on the spot, after the thievery he was unwilling accomplice to. It’s been more than twenty years since then, and still trusting him was a stretch she was almost unwilling to take.

But she digresses. 

Marjorie walks through the shelves with such familiarity. She could never be lost here, even if she might lose herself. Each book bears her signature, arcane and the rhythm of Time intertwined, each a fraction of a moment apart between the ward she placed on one and another. The meandering spiral she glides through takes her past so many volumes she’s consumed with her own eyes.

While she can’t say that she’s read everything in her library, she can say that she’s read more than most. Some collectors don’t engage with their collection at all, and those people infuriate her. She knows each and every work she’s archived personally, warded every single one. Yes, of course it has taken her ages to get here--she started with little more than a chest, and look at her now!

The act of possession just isn’t enough. 

Marjorie takes the long way to her office, stopping to check her work. In one of the corners she doesn’t pass through often she finds an insignia just slightly smudged. One of its intricate loops and spindly spikes is smeared downward, as though someone ran their finger through it. That sort of thing doesn’t happen unless the ward was already extremely weak, and her brow furrows as she frowns.

Did someone come through here? Someone who wasn’t allowed? It’s unlikely--in all her years here she’s had only one successful thief, and that was in no way the fault of her magic. A spike of paranoia shoots up her spine. She looks one way, and then another. Even like this, the spell should still work on the unsuspecting, but--

“It was Basil,” a familiar rolling burr curls around a nearby shelf. Agnes slinks overtop of one, hand over hand as she works her way down to ground level. “Don’t worry yourself over it. He noted it down on the floor plan.”

This is a woman who understands. Marjorie relaxes minutely and offers her sister a small smile. The kitbull tilts her head in return, a smile with sharp black teeth. A greeting. “Did he really? I thought he would have texted me.”

“You hate texting,” Agnes points out mildly, “and you check the floor plan every day.”

“Yes, well,” Marjorie says, and then huffs. It’s true that her texting experience is limited to recent years courtesy of one beautiful satyr she wants to keep in touch with, though typically she’d rather call. “Sure. Of course.”

Agnes vrrs in a way that indicates laughter. “Are you going to fix the ward or not, sister mine?”

“I am,” Marjorie sniffs as though offended, but she can’t hold back a smile for very long. “You may want to step back. This is one of the stronger ones.”

“I haven’t turned into confetti yet, have I?” Still, Agnes backs off a few paces, climbing back up the shelf with practiced ease. She’ll watch from above and feed on some of the magic that radiates outward, as per the norm. 

Marjorie presses her fingers to the broken insignia and shuts her eyes. She breathes in. This is certainly one of the more complicated ones in her arsenal, though not because it’s very close to the center. On the contrary, sometimes she places stronger wards in unusual places, just to throw someone off the scent. If every powerful bit of magic was concentrated in one place, any thief would know immediately where they needed to go. 

No, better to spread some of them out. 

This is a funny bit of Time magic. The unwelcome who pass into this aisle might find themselves looping back around,  hungry and confused, as though they’d been lost for days. It muddles the senses--time passes strangely in the Archives, but near these runes especially. It’s hard to say whether it speeds or slows so much as warps. If one were to stop in an aisle protected by this, they might find they’ve been inside it for hours longer than they intended--days, perhaps, at its highest point. An ill-advised and altogether unpleasant way to be found, caught in this sticky trap, totally disoriented…

Marjorie exhales as she lifts the mark from the wood, peeling it free not so much physically as magically. It floats a few inches from the surface it’s meant to be embedded in, now far more malleable to her. 

She traces one pale green nail along the smudged edge, straightening it out with a sigh of magic. When everything is in its proper place, she takes the thread of Time and pushes it through each arc and loop, suturing the insignia back down to its previous spot in the wood. At one point in her life, she used an actual needle to channel her power, but she’s long since grown out of the need for such things.

It stitches back down with a little resistance. The wood is receptive, not only because of the tree it was made from but because of how old and familiar it is. It and her magic are friends with one another, in a sense. If it were something new, something plastic or metal, a different kind of magic she had to overcome, she might have a little more trouble.

This, though. This is as easy as breathing. Her eyes go half-lidded as she works, soothed and sedated by this particular calm. When she knots Time at the end of the thread and the ward is firmly back in place, the aisle ripples in a wave of renewal and she feels it shift around her. It doesn’t affect her in the same way it would an intruder or a particularly lost guest - one in the same, really - but because of who she is she can feel the shift.

“Beautiful work, as ever,” Agnes says above, sounding sleepy and full. She’s unlikely to actually sleep, but Marjorie knows she’ll be basking there for a while. 

“Don’t eat the whole ward,” Marjorie tells her, though Agnes hasn’t done that in years and years and years. Not since she was very small and Marjorie was barely into her first century. 

Agnes looks down at her and makes a sound that’s less translatable words and more content acknowledgement. Marjorie nods back and continues on her way to the office. A sharp right, and then another. One of the ladders meant to help Basil get up toward the top of the shelves is here, being that he can’t very well levitate them off like she can. 

Shameful of him to have magic inapplicable to his current occupation, but she’s sure he’ll survive. She gave him the spell sleeve for a reason, after all. Maybe one day he’ll take better to lessons that aren’t just intellectual. 

She runs her fingers along the ladder as she passes by it, skirts through another aisle, and another, and another…

The Archives are massive, and she finds her way.

An almost-hidden spiral staircase in a nook two times wider than the rest at long last leads her down to the first basement. Things are cool and dark and dry here--more delicate materials like scrolls and maps are stored on this floor, as are the rarer books with more magical properties. It’s best not to have those above, where a visitor could run into them, no matter how miniscule the chances.

The first basement, however, is off-limits to everyone save her, Agnes, and Basil. If a visitor absolutely needs to see one of these materials, Basil would probably fetch the text and bring it upstairs. Not the other way around. Not after last time.

This is not the floor she needs, however, and Marjorie gives it a long onceover before continuing down the steps. She’ll check the wards more thoroughly later tonight, she expects. At the moment another project is calling her name.

As the stairs continue downward, their smooth rounded sides open into patterned wooden dividers. Upon emerging into her study, the staircase looks more like a beautiful support beam, surrounded by rafters to steady the room itself. 

The room is octagonal and lit by dim, warm lanterns set into the walls. Also set into the walls are the shelves--shelves and shelves of books and scrolls and miscellanea. She circles around the room to check that everything’s still in place. Her work desk is still there, of course, with its comfortable chair and a neatly stacked pile of books she plans to do work on.

Puddled around the armchair of her reading corner is Fortuna, a dalon who barely looks up when Marjorie murmurs a hello. In the armchair are two sleeping kettlecats who won’t be moved until she inevitably has to shoo them off for a few hours. Even then, Meredith and Tanner will find their way back into her lap eventually. All of them really love this chair, it seems.

That’s fair, considering Marjorie does, too. She’s spent many a night researching in it. Occasionally she even falls asleep. This is it--this is her safest place, where she takes each individual book and cares for it in her own way. Often she reads it first, but not always. No matter how hard she tries, there will always be something that resists her. Some things fall outside of her area of expertise, even at her age.

Some things are just too cursed to be held for that long.

Nonetheless, her work for today begins with that which she has already read, neatly stacked on her desk. She breathes in.

Her desk chair welcomes her, as it always does, and she summons an everlit candle with a wave of her hand to light the work she intends to do. The tome she puts in front of herself is thick and dry. It’s a history of a country on a planet she’s never gone to and probably never will, made with a thick paper from a coniferous tree. The binding is threaded string laced through a leather exterior. The title and authors are burned onto the cover, and the font is neat and tight in a script somewhat outside the modern language of the time. 

It’s old, but resilient. It will do fine on the first floor. She takes a blank bit of parchment and an old-fashioned quill. Despite the number of fountain pens Basil has tried to give her, they’ve never settled quite as nicely as a feather in her hand, dipped in the proper inks.

She lays first a looping foundation with a fine black ink and lets time tick by as it dries. Another layer, then, traced over the same pattern, but this time she uses a mossy tincture to compliment the conifer that the book is made from. A third time, but with blood ink to compliment the leather. Wards always take more easily when they’re made of things that flow well with their recipient.

Along the edge of the forming imprint she adds small runes of power. This will protect from harm, from fire and sticky fingers and the ravages of Time itself. It’s a delicate web of directions in a conduit of power, but the true magic won’t happen until she lifts it away from the parchment.

As she does, it floats at her fingertips and draws on her energy. She inspects it for a long moment and judges it to be passable. It’s a fine, steady work, and she opens to the first page of the book it belongs to so that she might begin to sew it in.