Most of a Pen

THE TOWER. The crumbling wizard’s tower at Cradlebay, in the forest called the Spires, and I went looking for a pen that writes the truth and I want to tell you about EVERY SINGLE STEP.

First, the building itself, which is wrong in an interesting way. The top half is simply GONE — and there is nowhere near enough rubble for that, which I noticed immediately and said so — and what remains is being held up by vegetation grown through the cracks. The plants are the load-bearing element. A wizard’s tower is standing because a plant decided to.

Inside, the library. Or what was a library. Rotted to unreadable pulp, every last volume of it, and I stopped and I mourned it properly on Ook’s behalf because somebody should and Ook was not there to do it.

But here is the thing that unlocked the whole afternoon: the decay is not uniform. Some surfaces are fine. Some are pulp. And it is not about exposure, it is about which surfaces carry RUNES — and the runed ones survived. The runes preserve. I did not work this out immediately. I worked it out because I could not stop asking why one board was rotten and the one beside it was not.

A floorboard creaked WRONG. Two pries with a comically large screwdriver and there is a cavity seven feet down where everything is unusually well preserved, and in it two wooden boxes with brass keyholes. The first one SHOCKED me. One point of damage, and my dignity. The second held a stone bearing an artificing glyph I did not recognise.

Upstairs there is a third stair I had been warned about, and I LEAPT OVER IT ENTIRELY, because Vale told me it was broken and I am the sort of person who writes advice down and then USES it.

The workshop above still has its glass ceiling intact. A workbench. Tools I could not identify, which I have illustrated in full so that somebody else can. And a deconstructed telescope — optics, lenses, panes.

So I assembled the lenses. Of course I did. And through one pane, RUNES. Etched across every intact structural surface in the building, in a hand I cannot read, in a script that is HOMEGROWN — unique to this wizard, his own invented approach, not any convention I know. And the runes are on structure only. Never on furniture. He was warding the BUILDING, not his things.

Then I panned the lens across the floor and one flagstone burned brighter than the rest, carrying a glyph found nowhere else in the tower. I pressed it with my hand. It CLICKED — and then the glyph on it CHANGED SHAPE, which I did not expect and which means a glyph’s state is mutable, which is a whole finding on its own and I have given it its own page.

And then I carried the lens case back downstairs and checked every single step, one at a time, because I had a horrible wonderful idea.

The ORIGINAL glyph — the one that flagstone had before I pressed it — matches the third stair. EXACTLY.

The broken stair. The one I was warned about. The one I had been jumping over all afternoon.

I pressed it with a GLOVED hand this time. Fool me once. It clicked, and a drawer popped open in its inner face, and inside the drawer was a brass key.

No lock in the building fits it. I checked them all. Then I sat down on the bottom stair with the key in my hand and made a list of every lock I had seen that day — and stopped, because the list was WRONG. It was missing one. I was forgetting what I already HAD. There was a locked box in my bag that had shocked me once already.

So I put it in the middle of the floor, aimed at the exit, and stood well out of its line, and turned the key.

Inside: PIECES. A slim tube. Small components, finely made, each carrying tiny script in that same homegrown hand, far too small to read — magnification failed and I tried three ways. I laid everything out on the workbench and did what one does: turned the pieces over, tried them against one another, worked at how they might fit and in what order. And the longer I worked, the more certain I became of what I was holding.

These are the pieces of a PEN. Is it THE PEN?!? Most of one — I am now confident of that, and of exactly what is absent: somewhere between one and three pieces are missing. Something to hold it together internally. Something to stop everything simply falling out of the case. And — crucially, maddeningly — a NIB. This pen has no nib.

The stone is not a pen part. It is too big. But it fits a DIVOT — and that divot is present on every one of the wizard’s tools that could serve the pen, and nowhere else in the building. There is an interaction there and I do not understand it yet.

And then I packed it. All of it — the pieces, each wrapped separately; the stone back in its box; the key; the lens case; the tools with the divots. Carefully, in order, labelled, cushioned against the road. It is all coming WITH me. Discovery that stays in a tower is just furniture, and I have research to do.

I closed the drawer on my way out, and the stair clicked back up.

And then, from upstairs, a second click.

The whole thing re-locks. Everything I solved this afternoon is waiting, reset, for whoever comes next. I have written down every step in order so that person can be me.

The furniture, incidentally — what survived of it — traces to the western coast, in the north. Valaria.

So that is where I am going.

Note to self, written on the day and repeated here because I did not do it: ACQUIRE ROPE.