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 Posted: Wed Feb 02, 2011 9:55 am
prologue
[The boy who traveled around the world stood at the peak of the mountain. Before him was the bone of truth, the object of his desires, and long did he stand before it, asking every question he had ever wondered. When he was quite finished, he again asked the jawbone the question which had been answered in a way that had pleased him best, only to find that the answer had changed. Panicking, he asked the jawbone why this would be, to which the jawbone replied with a command for the boy to lift it to his eyes.
BONE lifted to his eyes, the boy did see
All worlds, past and present, unveil themselves,
All truths, now and always, reveal themselves,
The True World, at his fingertips, unburdened by the blinding veils
OF SOCIETY great and small.
The boy saw the dazzling truth all around,
And so did he realize the number of truths,
More than one to each subject,
A MULTIPLICITY in each object,
From the smallest flower to the burning sun.
He saw sights so dazzling that he could not stand them,
And was obliged to lower the bone from his eyes.
AT ONCE the choking veil fell over his vision,
The world no longer true as it had been before.
The boy felt despair and asked the jawbone his final question,
To see the True World unaided was all he now desired of this life.
THE BONE was silent for a long time.
One day and one night passed, and the boy waited patiently,
Not sleeping, not eating, not leaving to find food.
Alone on the mountain with the quiet bone god.
ON the second day, the bone gave its answer,
Told the boy to scrutinize each object in the world and then,
Once the boy had discerned all the truths of every aspect,
Every blade of grass, and every tone a man might use to greet another,
THEN would the boy live in the True World.
The boy left the bone on its crumbling mountain,
And many years passed, until the mountain was consumed by the sea.
To this day, men seek the True World, and call themselves men of the bone.
BONE]
The Boy and the Bone, one of many versions from the contribution book of Finnigan Finch.
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Posted: Mon Feb 21, 2011 3:57 pm
Today is a held-breath day.
Wickwright knows it when he wakes up and the leather case where his book was dripping black plague last night is empty. He knows that no one's taken it, but he doesn't know where it is, or even if he's ready to know. So instead of saying anything, Wickwright lies on his spartan mattress for a few seconds longer, then reluctantly gets up. Today is an important day, a deciding day. Everything depends on how today goes, but Wickwright isn't ready to decide anything just yet, barely even ready to get out of bed.
He hears something skittering around the wagon as he straightens up. perhaps rats, perhaps...
Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. He shakes his head and goes outside, starting a fire and sitting down to cook something resembling breakfast. He's been on the road for about a week without stopping, and the next town is close, but not close enough to get food from. At any rate, the fresh air is sobering, and as the chill envelops him, he heaves a sigh. The fire is warm in the chilly morning mist, and as it envelops and crisps his sausage, he stares into its core. He had planned for this day over the last few months. There were things he was going to say, things he was going to do, ways he was going to prepare himself to face the inevitable.
His life's work is rui- plagued.
The fact that that isn't the end of the world has taken a while to train into him, but he's done it. He doesn't know how long it will take to train into the Society, but he will do it. And somehow, when he finally musters up the strength to go back into that wagon, he will face the thing, his book, running around in there, and he will convince it of what needs to be done as well. Teach it. Raise it. Train it so that when he has to confess to the Society, what they see won't be an outsider, but a contribution, trained like a Jawbone Man.
He puts his head in his hands. Right here, right now, being faced with the solid reality makes his head hurt. Instead, he bites his sausage. It's a nice morning, he reflects, everything else aside. There are birds singing in the trees, a reminder that spring is coming to Imisus, and a reminder of what a long winter it's been for him. Longer than most, because, of course, of the unusual stress.
He couldn't work on his book while it was plagued. That alone had been almost enough to drive him those last few inches over the edge. Working on the book had become something more than cathartic, it had become a part of who he was, something reassuring, a way of establishing his sense of self. Without that ritual, the past few months had been a daze, a dream. He had taken to writing his thoughts down on plain parchment, but it wasn't the same. It wasn't his book.
Today is the day he can work on his book again, but now it's all different. He hasn't been inside the wagon again yet, hasn't let out this held breath caught in his chest, but he knows that when he does, his world will change. Unalterably, inevitably, undeniably, forever. Not just for the rest of his life, whatever is in that wagon is his contribution, the thing by which the society will remember him. And now it's moving, breathing, thinking in that wagon, and a part of it is definitely not him. It feels like glancing into a looking glass to find that his eyes have turned green, unnerving, and foreign, foreign, foreign. He's better with dealing with new things than most Jawbone Men, admittedly- he's a Finch man, and Finch men are supposed to be flexible. But this is personal, this is him, and his book is a part of him, only now it's sort of not. After over 30 years of working on his book, that's the kind of reality that kicks like a mule, and no amount of flexibility is enough to really bounce back.
He realizes he's forgotten about his sausage, bites into it, and winces. By now it's cold, but he finds that he isn't hungry anyway. Instead, he sticks the skewer into the ground next to the fire and gets up once again, looking at the wagon.
He's going to have to go back inside. The only thing that distracting himself has managed so far is to waste a sausage and some time. The thing inside the wagon is the only thing he can think about.
Wickwright Finch gets up, looks in his wagon, and lets out that held breath.
"Book?"
There's a scuffle, then a reply, and quietly, just like that, everything changes.
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Posted: Tue Feb 22, 2011 9:25 am
i. hopkin and wickwright
[After Finch had left, Paxton asked O'Neill why he had no companion. Why, asked Paxton, would such an amiable Jawbone Man travel alone, when it was often the custom to travel in pairs, and thus shorten the miles left to walk? O'Neill sat Paxton down and explained of the rift between Bunting and Finch, and how no Finch would take another companion, despite companionship being in their nature.
SOLITUDE was not Finch's element,
For there was too much of the jabber in him to contain.
His tongue was deft, but constantly active,
And without Bunting to listen, he would have babbled to himself.
FOR generations, Finch and Bunting were like this,
Speaking and listening, telling each other truths
And stories, and half-remembered dreams,
Each Finch had a Bunting who he knew better than himself,
EACH Bunting had a Finch to whom he was loyal.
And for many generations, this was the way of things,
Neither was alone, and both felt blessed for the other.
But when the Bunting line failed and produced a woman,
FINCH weakened in the face of the power of her womanhood.
His truths turned to sonnets and admirations,
He mistook his intimacy with Bunting for love.
Bunting saw clearly and severed the tie,
THOUGH it pained her to do so, and the two never did meet again.
Nor did their descendants, shamed by the weakness of Finch's hot emotion.
Since then, Finches and Buntings have not taken new companions,
And may never again be so close to another as they once were to each other.
WERE one to once again travel with another, methinks it would be Finch,
For the Finch men are possessed of such restless minds,
They must have someone to speak to, or their thoughts spill out uselessly.
But for now, noble Paxton, Finch will punish himself and prattle in solitude.
SOLITUDE]
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Posted: Wed Feb 23, 2011 12:03 pm
The thing waits on the table.
He doesn't know what he is, but has a vague notion as to why he is. He remembers being loved and cared for and worked on, yes, he remembers that he is incomplete as well. He flexes his thin metal fingers and kicks his legs, as if testing everything out to find the missing bits now that he's changed. Are they on his body?
No.
In his mind? The thing takes a moment to reflect, watching the world of his stories build itself neatly inside his head. Nothing seems to be missing, but how does one know if they don't know something? It's much more difficult than knowing he's missing a limb, which by all accounts, he is not. He doesn't know the answer, so for now he sets the problem aside and looks at the entrance to the wagon.
He wonders if he should follow his creator. His creator is outside right now, has not even noticed him. He wants to follow his creator, to say something to him, but the words catch in his throat. Too cowardly, he sits on the table instead. What if his creator doesn't recognize him? Vaguely-recalled shouted words float through his memory from when he was still book-like.
Ruined.
That was what his creator had said first, ruined. The thing buries his head in his skinny knees, repeating the word nervously. He knows what it means. He wishes he didn't. As a book, he had more intrinsic value, yes, but certainly he can prove his usefulness somehow. How can he be ruined if he's still here? How can he be not good enough when he's more than he was before, when he's mobile and sentient and all those clever things his creator is? It doesn't make logical sense, it just doesn't follow. He's better now. He knows he is.
But what if his creator is right? He's certainly never questioned him before. How could he? His creator has always been right, wrote the way of the world in his pages. Why should he question him now of all times? Just because he's sentient? Why does sentience give him the right?
He considers leaving. If the creator never sees him, he will never know what the creator meant by ruined. He will never have to disappoint or be disappointed. Running away seems so simple, so elegant, so tantalizingly easy, but he needs answers, and he needs help, and he can't handle the outside on his own. He can barely even handle the inside on his own. So he waits for the familiar because that is even easier, even if it comes with disappointment. He isn't ready to be alone, hasn't been alone for over thirty years, those fuzzy, vague years that he remembers like a dream. Odd to remember his stories so clearly yet have such a difficult time remembering the shadowy past. It's like fish in a pond, of the thirty years he only sees thirty wriggling shadows. He doesn't like the imprecision, so he thinks of other things.
He was bigger as a book, he thinks, looking at the pens and quills next to him. Now he's small. Maybe that's why his creator is upset. Certainly he doesn't look like years of work, he barely looks like seconds of work. Looking down at his hands, he frowns at his own plain appearance. Maybe if he wants to be valuable, he can start by fixing that. Glances around the wagon revel the tempera paints he's so familiar with, the ones that were used on his pages, and he turns to them again, reaching a tiny metal hand in and smearing himself with red, blue, white, yellow.
Nothing works. The paint slides off too easily, and the more of it he smears on, the more the tones themselves become brown and muddy, like they're being ruined by being on his skin. He lets out a frustrated noise and sits next to the paints, head in hands. He doesn't know how to make himself better. He needs help.
"Book?" calls a hesitant voice from a half-remembered dream.
The thing looks up, and there it is.
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Posted: Mon Mar 07, 2011 10:53 am
"Filius, filii, filio, filium, filie, filii, filiorum, filiis, filios, filiis," a tinny little voice recites.
The first few days have been review, as Wickwright tries to find out what his plagued book remembers. The plague remembers everything, he tells Wickwright this, but Wickwright says that a Jawbone Man who doesn't check is no Jawbone Man at all. The plague mentions the story of Frankel and the Waterfall, and Wickwright says yes, and look how that turned out.
"Not well, not for Frankel," the plague remembers quietly, twiddling his thumbs as he sits on Wickwright's desk.
"That's right. Jawbone Men who don't ask questions only end up in trouble," Wickwright affirms.
"Finch men end up in trouble anyway," his plague points out, and Wickwright laughs despite himself.
"Cheeky devil," he says, crinkling his blue eyes up at the metal boy, "You're troublesome enough, all right." The plague laughs too, since Wickwright is doing it, but he feels hollow in his chest. He isn't trying to cause problems, he's simply trying to state facts. He isn't sure what he's done wrong, but vows to try harder.
Wickwright gets up and paces the room. The plague's gaze follows him, though obscured by the bandages wrapped around his head. Wickwright doesn't understand how the thing can see, but apparently it can, and it refuses to remove the wrappings. His Grimm leaves well enough alone, it's of no concern to him what the book looks like, so long as it knows the right things. "If I'm going to teach you how to be a Jawbone Man, you need a name."
"Finch?" the thing on the desk suggests hopefully. Wickwright scratches his head.
"You're not a Finch, little devil," he admonishes gently. "Made by a Finch, yes, but contributions are not Finches, if you understand."
"Yes, Wickwright Finch," the plague whispers.
"Wickwright will suffice, I think. And for you... Hopkin."
The thing looks up and repeats the word. "Hopkin. Why?"
"I had an uncle named Robert. He was a bit of a cheeky devil, too. That way you can be named after a Finch, even if you aren't one." He sees the plague doesn't understand, and adds, "It's a diminutive. You're far too little to be a Robert."
Hopkin counts on his fingers. "They have the same number of letters though," he notes, perplexed.
"Yes, but it sounds smaller."
Hopkin pretends to understand, nodding rapidly. He doesn't know how a word can sound smaller, but it's true that 'Hopkin' seems more fragile. The way it sounds in his mouth is more uncertain than a big, rich Robert. It makes Hopkin feel fragile too, and he looks down at his fine metal hands, pressing the fingers into a fist. They creak and groan under the pressure and he lets them back out again. Fragile is fitting enough, he supposes with a hint of melancholy. He looks up at Wickwright and tells him what he's thinking.
"Of course," Wickwright confirms. "You're a very fragile book, Hopkin, and you have to keep yourself safe." He leans on the desk so his face is level with Hopkin's all traces of mirth gone. "If you should ever be broken," he says, slowly and carefully, "We will both be ruined."
They finish their review, but those are the words that haunt Hopkin as he goes to sleep, more than the Ardenian, more than the stories, more than his name. He can remember the way Wickwright's lips moved when he said it, can still recall the feel of his warm breath on his bronze skin.
He cannot imagine that he will ever forget.
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Posted: Sat Mar 12, 2011 6:42 pm
The world Hopkin wakes up in is flat.
It is a world that makes perfect sense to him, the kind that he always knew the conscious world should be like, which makes it a shame that the world he has awoken in is not the conscious world. For, as well as he knows that this world is perfect, so too does he know that he is asleep, and the perfection is as shallow as a shadow. He stands up anyway, hastily clutching at his bandages and reaffixing them, as they've become unravelled in his sleep underneath the loose night robe that he has been able to fashion from good brown burlap. He notices that, like the world, he, the burlap, and the bandages are flat images in a paper-thin plane of existence. This pleases him, and he smiles in a world there there is no depth for the light from his mouth to cast itself into.
However, there is some sense of distance, he notices, and though the world doesn't appear to have any width to it, he can walk near and far, and objects grow larger and smaller as he does so. It's the kind of effect that would make a human, used to their vast world, dizzy. Hopkin becomes accustomed to it soon enough, walking down a road that appears to extended into nowhere. Eventually, he grows comfortable with himself in this new world and begins to sing a song. The words fall at his feet and play like kittens before vanishing, merry little things, all 'la's and 'when spring return's, all eager to form and eager to disappear. He watches them and there's a dance in his step as he frolics with them, making his walk seem shorter for the pleasure of it. Wickwright isn't here. There are no lessons, nothing strange, no one wanting anything from him, and he finds himself reveling in it, exploring what he already knows just for the sake of finding out what it's become now that he's in this strange new body lent to him by plague.
"Hello, my name is Hopkin!" he calls as he reaches the end of the road, more out of a desire to see what kind of words will hang in the air than anything else.
"Hello," something calls back tentatively, and Hopkin startles, falling down in surprise, and at the same time, waking back into Wickwright's world of depth and confusion.
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Posted: Sat Mar 12, 2011 7:37 pm
The first time that Hopkin sees the outside world is that morning.
So far he has only seen the inside of the wagon, sometimes snatches of sky or grass from cracks in the wood. But today, Wickwright opts to take him out, show him how one starts a fire and prepares food. It sounds simple enough, but Hopkin is knocked flat by the vision in front of him, by the endless infinity of the outdoors. It's nothing like he pictured. Even the sky, just blue in his head, seems to be an endless arch, something so perfect and vast that he can't possibly formulate a replica in his mind.
Looking at it makes him want to cry. How can he possibly learn all the details about a world that looks like this? In his mind, his own world seems so safe, so accessible. This is just a tiny part of Wickwright's world and even that seems never ending, crushing, huge. He sits on the edge of the wagon for a while and just watches it while Wickwright waits, evidently giving him time to take it all in. Evenutally, when Hopkin doesn't come, Wickwright returns to the edge of the wagon and joins him.
"It's too much," Hopkin says hoarsely, clutching the edge of his Grimm's blue robe for support. "How am I ever supposed to know everything about a world so wide?"
"Everything," Wickwright repeats with surprise, "Whoever said you need to know everything?"
"Jawbone Men are supposed to know the truth," Hopkin replies morosely.
"Ah," Wickwright answers, stroking his chin. "But you see, that's the beauty of it! All Jawbone Men know a tiny part of the truth, and together, all our truths will one day create everything there is to know about the world. It's a process, Hopkin. You can't build a world in a day, or even thirty years. It takes time, more time than any one Jawbone Man, or Jawbone Book, will ever have alone. It's together that we'll know everything about our wide world. Do you understand?"
"Our wide world," Hopkin repeats. His wide world is already complete in his head. Imagining that a world could take so long to know is staggering to him, but it's the 'our' that pulls him through to grasping the notion. Wickwright has never referred to anything as 'ours' before, and Hopkin has certainly never imagined this world as anything but Wickwright's. The sense that they might share it is something intoxicating, and it makes the concept of knowing it less daunting to behold. He nods hesitantly, clambering onto Wickwright's robe to get a better look at the place.
"I understand our wide world, Wickwright," says Hopkin more enthusiastically. "I-I'd like to understand some more. Like a proper Jawbone Man, yes, I'd like to try."
"In that case," Wickwright decides, "Today we shall spend some time outside the wagon and take a look at it."
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Posted: Sat Mar 12, 2011 7:38 pm
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Posted: Sat Mar 12, 2011 7:40 pm
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Posted: Sat Mar 12, 2011 7:41 pm
When Dragomir Meschke leaves, Hopkin watches him go. He sits on the edge of the wagon, clutching the side as hard as he can so he won't fall off, and he watches until not even the place Dragomir Meschke was left in can be seen on the horizon.
Hopkin has mixed feelings about the departure. There is, undeniably, a feeling of relief, for a man who can kill is no sort of man that Hopkin feels comfortable around. The tenets of Jawbone society are centered around creation and discovery, pure and simple. The thought of destroying something, anything, especially a man, is something that Hopkin, a creature born of such tenets, cannot begin to fathom. But there's also a curiosity he feels that rumbles unsatisfied. He would have liked to hear Dragomir Meschke speak more, to explain what Hopkin cannot explain himself. What he tried to tell was disjointed at best, Hopkin is still not sure of what it is like to kill, nor what drove him to it, but only knows that it was a great and dark thing, and he feels sorry that it happened to him. Dragomir Meschke is a creature that is too pretty to deserve such terrible circumstances, but Wickwright says that even the beautiful can do wrong, as strange as that seems to Hopkin. For Dragomir was haunted, and he was sick, but he was beautiful and fragile, and Hopkin values that enormously. He is haunted by Dragomir Meschke's blue eyes and fine hair, and even as he is relieved, he's bothered by a sort of hunger that has nothing to do with curiosity eating away at him; Dragomir was beautiful, and Hopkin still wants him to be close so he can properly enjoy that.
He turns away from the edge of the wagon and curls himself up, grasping his knees and wiggling his bronze fingers as he does so. Hopkin does not consider himself to be a very pretty thing, although he knows he is more valuable than diamonds, for WIckwright has told him. His fingers, though, are his best quality, he thinks. They're slight and bright and delicate, and he likes to move them to see how they look when he does so. He thinks that insofar as his outside reflects his inside, his fingers reflect it best, and sometimes he opens his mouth just so the light will make them shine brighter.
Wickwright is also quite delicate, he thinks as he gazes into the wagon, with the spidery lines creeping across his skin, and the tallness and thinness of his body. His eyes, too, are the most vivid blue, like chunks of sky. Looking at them makes Hopkin pleased, although red, by far, is his favourite colour. He has not seen much of it, but the brightness of it fills his vision and distracts him from everything else when it's in sight. He feels the bandages that are around his neck, red from a stiff bookbinding cloth that Wickwright has, to keep his spine safe. He's glad it's red, but wishes he could see it better.
He thinks of the other red he's seen, that Dorian Arelgren was wearing in the pub where all the confusion happened that first day outside. Dorian Arelgren was also a beautiful person, and Hopkin feels briefly upset that he hadn't come with them and Dragomir Meschke, even though he could not count to twenty-two. Like Dragomir Meschke, Hopkin feels a sort of sense of loss at his absence, a greedy kind of feeling that he isn't entirely comfortable with.
He wants more. This wagon isn't enough anymore. Wickwright is delicate and he is bright, but the world is beautiful, even if it's confusing, and the world in his head is no longer enough. The thought is terrifying, but the thought is there. Hopkin needs the wide world, the world that Wickwright called our wide world like a fish needs water. As it passes by, he watches it from the wagon and wishes that Wickwright would stop more frequently.
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Posted: Thu Mar 17, 2011 8:25 pm
When Hopkin returns to his dream world, he's on the ground.
It takes a moment to remember why, but he gets up again as soon as he recalls the voice that answered to his rhetorical greeting, warily eyeing the flat scenery around him. However, as time has passed in the waking world, so too has time passed in the dream world. Whoever answered is long gone, leaving Hopkin alone at the end of the road.
Only it hasn't ended. The road has grown, and as Hopkin stands up, he sees a town in the distance, similar to the one that Wickwright took him to that day they met Dragomir Meschke and Dorian Arelgren. So his world becomes wide as well, Hopkin deduces, and rather than set off for the town, he walks in the opposite direction, to see what else there might be here in his head. This time there's no singing as he walks- whatever is on this road, Hopkin wants to see it before it sees him.
The effort is in vain. "Hello," says the same voice that he heard before, more confident this time, and less startling. Hopkin takes a step backwards, looking for the source. His heart is beating fast, and to his shame he finds that even though this is his own mind, he is afraid of finding out what greeted him. There's a sense of foreign-ness that makes him uncomfortable. Still, he's a Jawbone Book, and so questions must be answered whether the answer will reassure him or not.
"Hello," Hopkin replies, and with that, a figure steps out from behind a tree, a fluid sideways motion in this flat world. Hopkin relaxes at once, for it, like everything in Wickwright's book, is instantly recognizable. Or rather, he is instantly recognizable, for the flat figure greeting him is that of a Jawbone Man. The robes and the look of his face makes him a Finch, and though Hopkin himself is only a Finch book, it makes him feel like he's among family. "You're Finch, right?" he asks, just to be sure, and the figure grins, nodding. "Which Finch?" he asks as the figure begins to walk down the road as well. Finch shrugs, and Hopkin frowns. "Finnigan Finch?" he guesses, seizing upon the name most familiar to him besides Wickwright's. Finch shrugs again.
"It doesn't matter," he informs Hopkin. "I'm any Finch. Every Finch. We all look exactly the same."
Hopkin frowns. "Is that really how it works?"
"Why not? A Finch is a Finch is a Finch. How do you know who I am anyway? You're not a Jawbone Man."
"How do you know?" Hopkin asks defensively, though it's true.
"You need to be a man to be a Jawbone Man, little bronze boy, You didn't answ-" He pauses, staring ahead. "Stop." Hopkin bumps into him as he suddenly comes to a halt and peers out from behind his leg. "Can you hear something?"
"I can hear singing."
"Little bronze boy, run!"
He feels himself getting pushed, and wakes up in his book bag, clutching his head with tiny metal hands. There is no Finch but Wickwright near him, but the music still echoes in his head. How can something he knows, the contents of his mind, generate so many questions? How can he have a wide world in his mind to explore as well? He doesn't know how he feels about the situation. Glad, maybe, that he has a place to explore when Wickwright doesn't let him leave the wagon. Upset that nothing is simple. All he knows is that for the rest of the day the melody haunts his mind, and though Finch ordered him to run, all he wants is to go back to sleep.
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Posted: Wed Mar 23, 2011 6:18 pm
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Posted: Wed Mar 23, 2011 6:23 pm
Hopkin is looking for it this time, and he finds it; the Devil's Bristle in his dreamland, hidden in a sandy hollow. The singing he had heard last time isn't in the air, but it's still ringing in his head. Finch had told him to run, so he left the road, running, yes, out of fear and because he doesn't know how long he has in the flat world this time around. Finch is nowhere in sight, but Hopkin doesn't particularly mind. He didn't really understand the enigmatic Jawbone Man the last time they met, and it made speaking to him particularly off-putting. Hopkin likes knowing precisely who he's speaking to, and Finch is uncomfortably vague, not like Wickwright, who patiently explains everything about the wider world and knows all the answers. Still, Hopkin worries for Finch out of some ill-fitting sense of kinship. Hopkin isn't a Jawbone Man and even Finch knows that just by looking at him, but he is a Jawbone Book, or at least Wickwright has told him so.
Hopkin examines the Devil's Bristle in the hollow, but it's far too large for him to pull out of its hiding place. He's sure that if he could look farther, he'd find the other herbs from the marketplace where he and Wickwright met the alarmingly strange woman. Over the nights, he has found that everything he memorizes is in this world, slowly growing with each lesson he learns. The growth of this flat world is painstakingly slow, but intensely rewarding- seeing the wider world manifest itself in the perfect two-dimensional figures that please Hopkin so much is better than poetry, sheer joy to witness even if his flat world occasionally coughs up something alarming, like the singing that scared Finch so much or even Finch himself. Hopkin thinks of these things and hopes the marketplace woman isn't living in his head now. Though the wide world has pretty, precious characters, Hopkin thinks that the perfect world would be empty and simple, something just his and no one else's. Uncomplicated, yes. The perfect world would have nothing to confuse him, nothing-
The devil's bristle disappears. Hopkin looks up to find Finch standing over him, holding the herb at arm's length. "That's new," he remarks, raising an eyebrow in the way Wickwright sometimes does. "Yours?"
"H-hello Finch," Hopkin stammers once he collects his wits. "I think it's everyones'. Unless you're the only person here, then it's just ours." The words hover around his head like nervous gothic-script birds, while Finch's ooze around his feet like cats.
"Hello little bronze boy," Finch replies carelessly. "I'm sure your company is sparkling, but an empty world would be terribly dull, don't you think?"
"No," Hopkin replies honestly. Finch laughes.
"You're strange, little bronze boy. What happened to you last time?"
"I woke up," he answers again.
Finch scratches his head. "Cryptic."
"But what about the singing?" Hopkin asks desperately. "I couldn't stop thinking about it all day. What was it? Why was it dangerous?"
A darker expression crosses Finch's face. "It was," he spits, "A dangerous song. Have you ever heard of sirens?"
"No."
"I wouldn't recommend them. Forget the song if you can. I heard it once and now I can't get it out of my head."
"You have thoughts?" Hopkin demands, diverted from the conversation.
"Most people do, little bronze boy."
Most people didn't live inside Hopkin's dreams. "Which Finch are you?" he repeats.
"It doesn't matter, little bronze boy."
"Hopkin."
"Hopkin."
"But I don't know of any Finches who heard sirens," he wails, "I don't even know what a siren is." Nothing Finch said seemed to make any sense, and in this world that is otherwise so perfect and logical to him, it stings. It stings all the worse because this is a Finch, one of Wickwright's ancestors, and they're supposed to make the most sense of all.
"How do you know so much about Finches anyway, Hopkin?"
"I'm a Jawbone Book," he replies guilelessly, looking a little uncertain but proud nonetheless. "You said I wasn't a Jawbone Man last time we met, but I'm a part of the Jawbone Society."
Finch sits down, and in his distraction, clenches onto the devil's bristle in his hands. The fruit pinches him and blood flies out in an almost cartoonish straight line, vanishing into the flat world's ether. Finch drops the fruit, cussing, and seeing it move away from him in flat world physics is practically comedic. His curse words seethe like angry snakes as he sucks on his hand, staring at Hopkin like he's never seen him before. "So you're the source, then?"
"I don't know," Hopkin asks. "I need to ask Wickwright Finch, he's my author."
"You're the source," Finch confirms. "There's a legend that the characters whisper in this world."
"What legend?"
"The legend of the end of the world," Finch replies.
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Posted: Wed Mar 23, 2011 6:56 pm
[And Finch staunched his bleeding hand, and in the flat world he sat with the book boy, telling him of the story of the world's end in the tradition of Jawbone Men since time immemorial, his words hovering in the air in the poetic form that the Society had long since adopted as their own. And Hopkin listened, intent upon knowing the proof Finch had of his connection to this nearly-perfect world, intent and half afraid to believe that something so vast could be tied to one as small and fragile as he.
[F] EVIDENCE, I would not call it that, but a story, one not written in any book.
Unique to this world and whispered on the wind,
A story or myth or fairytale that we characters propagate,
A story about the pages of the stories that make up this flat world.
IT is said that deep in this world, so deep that one can see the cover,
There is a blank space one might fall into forever.
There is no ground, only sky in this space, and in that sky,
Words that say one thing loudly and clearly.
'WICKWRIGHT FINCH FECIT,' Hopkin do you speak Ardenian?
Ah, I see by the look on your face that you do,
And so do you understand the meaning of the end of the world,
How far Finch has fallen, to live in the head of a little bronze boy!
[H] I hear what you speak, and it rings of truth,
Despite that this story is only hearsay,
But tell me please, Finch, how can it be,
This story is the end of the world, but that should be on the first page!
[F] My friend, when you stand on the edge of a void,
Whether it is the end or beginning, the prologue or the epilogue,
An endless chasm is the end of the world from the sheer cliffside,
Even with 'WICKWRIGHT FINCH FECIT' written in the sky as contrary evidence.
EVIDENCE.]
Hopkin wakes up.
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Posted: Wed Mar 23, 2011 6:57 pm
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