Ad Infinitum
Jul. 6th, 2025 05:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
yutzenThe tale below was painstakingly gathered from sources all across the Consortium, from the very heart of Tak-Fizun to the dustiest, most abandoned collections resting in abodes that were practically archaeological digs. Rather than the usual fragments, or deteriorated versions of an original, these were full retellings scattered far and wide, each missing its own unique assortment of important details, and with no clear “first”. And so, rather than assembling the story like a narrative jigsaw and bridging the gaps, as is my usual process, I overlaid them upon one another and trimmed the abundant fat.
The actual gathering of these versions, in turn, was also far from my usual process. Far less hurried transcriptions, for sure, but I must say I’m not fond of playing the part of “information broker”, exchanging datum for datum, assigning value to each individual thought and piece of knowledge just to trade it. I couldn’t always match the price, however, in which case it was back to the usual. “Mayhem is its own currency”, in the Vezarym’s own words. Fewer invaluable parchments in my hands that way, but putting a price on knowledge was an utterly grating experience anyhow.
When a story is written, is the author in control, or does the world they weaved together take the reins from them one day, the inhabitants forcing them to push them along in a direction of their choosing? At which point does an author realize if they take the reins, they would twist the world so far they’d break it, and lose the right to call themselves such? At every stage, from those weaving fiction right next to us to those that put our very world and fate together, the question remains the same. And at all heights, especially those far above us, we’ve found no answer.
But we do know that none of them are alone. There’s more Authors, who’ve written more stories still. Our tales, the compendium that is our existence? It sits in a grand library[1] whose shelves are being filled as we speak, countless tales by countless Authors! Each could be the story of but a single one of us, or maybe entire worlds! We might never fully the true extent of each story. We just know that there’s tales without number out there, their protagonists pushed forwards by the pens of countless Authors, each of them taking great care to make their own world spin[2]. And so they wield their quills, giving each and every one of these actors a trail to blaze…
However, only one of them actually reads what’s being written.
Whether they[3] were always in the library somewhere, came from the outside, or somehow leapt out of the bookshelves, they weren’t an Author – not at first. The Reader stood alone, stranded between endless shelves and surrounded by Authors far too busy with their tales to react to their presence. They’d all ignore their attempts at best, and outright threaten them at worst, much more interested in getting back to their perpetual works. And with neither answers nor a way out they could find, all that was left to do for this fellow lost among the bookshelves was to pick a story[4] up and start reading.
And they came to love it. They got deeply invested in that tale, and the one that followed, and those that came after! They loved the worlds within, and the peoples that dwelt within them, brought to life by the authors’ quills. They’d peruse worlds like ours, tales like our history, going back and forth through time itself as if years were but the number on a page! Story after story flew off the shelves into their hands to be perused, enjoyed, and returned. They filled their head with it all, with grandiose moments and favored individuals filling a mind that ached for more…
But soon enough, they started to wonder and imagine beyond what they’d read. Their head had soon become a library in itself, except the boundaries between stories were much thinner, making it much, much busier than any other! The Reader started asking themselves, “what if?” Bridging worlds and letting their inhabitants cross into each other in their mind, wondering how the tales would’ve turned out if they had. It wasn’t writing, of course, not yet. Nothing was on paper, but it entertained them nonetheless… And even then, at times, they couldn’t help but feel those dwelling in these tales were still making pushes of their own, even in these aimless musings. As if the Reader knew them so well they were all somehow there.
But the more they pondered, the more it all diverged. They started looking back at the stories themselves, and thinking… perhaps the authors writing them could’ve taken another path. Whether out of a sense of fairness here and there, or a feeling of missed opportunity, or out of sheer curiosity. They found themselves outright disagreeing with these paths, in small but important places. Not that they knew it at the time; they just thought they had some doubts as to the so-called plots before them.
And of course, there were the endings. The Reader kept finding them dull and dragging, or sudden to the point of unfairness, or finding them to be no ending at all. It was only natural for tales that cover whole worlds, which die either slowly and agonizingly, or suddenly and violently… and of course, there were those that simply froze in place, never to finish their turns, as the Author moved on to the next. A world cannot spin without a quill to trace its path. But the Reader refused to accept this. They wanted to know more, see more! They loved these stories around them as stories, and critiqued them as such, even as things they considered mere repetitive themes proved to be the simple natural conclusion of how these things go, ones the Authors didn’t bother to push past. They either couldn’t, or wouldn’t grasp this…
They never really would. The moment the Reader went back to the first Author they encountered to ask why one ending or another had turned out such, or why they’d thrown a given tale aside without ever finishing it? All they got was fury. None of these creators had ever been questioned beyond people of their making philosophizing deeply and with great worry, speculating at the void beyond the paper. To be directly questioned to their face, for the first time, they could not take. How dare they, the Author yelled. How dare this upstart question how a world is written, the paths they made for those that dwell in it. This is their world. These are their people, and they decide what happens to them, because they know them best. Who was this upstart to decide otherwise, someone that had never put pen to paper? And the Reader’s answer, that they’d actually seen the work of others enough to compare, to see the common mistakes, only incensed them further still! Pages flew and were thrown to and fro to go with the accusations, with the insults, with all that comes from the worst of arguments[5]…
Eventually, the Reader turned away, and the Author went back to their work, thinking they’d taught them a lesson. But little did they know that they’d just ensured said Reader would be an Author too, one that would claim these creations as their own if they were just going to shelf them forever, some unfinished.
They started prowling the halls, scouring the shelves, going for those tales that never truly ended, or were left lingering in a twilight, or came to end in a way they despised. And they’d cut into the book itself, and start slipping their own pages in-between, adding just enough to steer things towards a different end. Adding just enough of an epilogue to leave them open to a continuation, later. They would even tear out whole pages, dismantle parts of the world and the tale within, to take control of each narrative – because sometimes, the inhabitants just wouldn’t yield to their quill until the tale itself broke.
All the better for them. With the torn pages, stolen paper from the Authors, and even whole books snatched from the shelves when they were not looking, they would construct a grand work of their own. A singular sequel to everything they’d edited and torn and snatched, piled together into one grand heap of disorganized but passionate pages, where all those individuals they had found memorable could finally meet! Where entire worlds were bridged together, to cooperate and be troubled by each other in turn, with a billion moving parts that they could take control of and let go at will! A glorious undertaking, one they would immensely enjoy…
And one they would never realize was too big for them, or anyone.
Keeping track of so many worlds and their individuals at once turned it all into a morass. No book would coalesce from it, and it would remain a grand heap of scattered pages, scarcely bound, and often merely stacked upon one another or even heaped in piles! The setting became more bridge than world, as the locations themselves mashed together from the Reader’s failure to address them until it was too late. Time would skip back and forth until it was but an indistinct mass with little beginning or end, all of it moving forwards constantly, yet unevenly. And yet, whenever they could get back to one of the threads lost within this tangled skein, they couldn’t help but love every moment of pushing it forwards, especially for those that had just sprouted from the whole rather than being taken from another…
The Reader remains there to this day. Too willful to stop spreading this heap’s pages across the library, of letting more and more worlds be joined by sequel into the ever-growing, ever-more-tangled pile of raw story. Too ambitious to take the time to trim and streamline it all, give it actual clarity through excision. And too happy with the results to ever quit.
[1]I admit some minor artistic license here, as the wording used was closer to “book collection” than library, with an implication of ownership that never truly comes up again.
[2]Pre-Refuge material indicates the Vezarym’s original dwelling, Tirravzi, had a spherical shape (one of many in its realm), and its rotations were used to measure time, with the dwelling “spinning” being a common figure of speech to denote that time, life and history goes on. I understand this is a fairly common form of realm distribution outside the Subterraneum, but I felt the need to clarify.
[3]Almost all of the versions I found used gender-neutral terms to refer to this entity, with a general tendency towards “playing it safe” in terms of pronouns, leading me to believe this being’s gender was completely unknown or not applicable in the least. Those who strayed from this used male pronouns, which the Vezarym language tends to default to, reinforcing my claim.
[4]The word used here and elsewhere in most versions would literally translate to “manuscript”, not quite “book” (by Vezarym definitions it’s not a book until it’s physically bound), but quite a few of these versions made an aside to note how imperfect the word was, even if this was technically a story (meta)physically written by hand.
[5]More than one version tried to elaborate on said accusations and insults, but I could find no real common ground between them other than the Author’s arrogance being in greater display.
-Excerpt from “Who is the Lord Below? A Treatise on the Radiant and Cthonic”, authored by ‘the Ever-Restless Nirrhamidh’ (assumed pseudonym; author not yet identified and under active investigation)
The actual gathering of these versions, in turn, was also far from my usual process. Far less hurried transcriptions, for sure, but I must say I’m not fond of playing the part of “information broker”, exchanging datum for datum, assigning value to each individual thought and piece of knowledge just to trade it. I couldn’t always match the price, however, in which case it was back to the usual. “Mayhem is its own currency”, in the Vezarym’s own words. Fewer invaluable parchments in my hands that way, but putting a price on knowledge was an utterly grating experience anyhow.
When a story is written, is the author in control, or does the world they weaved together take the reins from them one day, the inhabitants forcing them to push them along in a direction of their choosing? At which point does an author realize if they take the reins, they would twist the world so far they’d break it, and lose the right to call themselves such? At every stage, from those weaving fiction right next to us to those that put our very world and fate together, the question remains the same. And at all heights, especially those far above us, we’ve found no answer.
But we do know that none of them are alone. There’s more Authors, who’ve written more stories still. Our tales, the compendium that is our existence? It sits in a grand library[1] whose shelves are being filled as we speak, countless tales by countless Authors! Each could be the story of but a single one of us, or maybe entire worlds! We might never fully the true extent of each story. We just know that there’s tales without number out there, their protagonists pushed forwards by the pens of countless Authors, each of them taking great care to make their own world spin[2]. And so they wield their quills, giving each and every one of these actors a trail to blaze…
However, only one of them actually reads what’s being written.
Whether they[3] were always in the library somewhere, came from the outside, or somehow leapt out of the bookshelves, they weren’t an Author – not at first. The Reader stood alone, stranded between endless shelves and surrounded by Authors far too busy with their tales to react to their presence. They’d all ignore their attempts at best, and outright threaten them at worst, much more interested in getting back to their perpetual works. And with neither answers nor a way out they could find, all that was left to do for this fellow lost among the bookshelves was to pick a story[4] up and start reading.
And they came to love it. They got deeply invested in that tale, and the one that followed, and those that came after! They loved the worlds within, and the peoples that dwelt within them, brought to life by the authors’ quills. They’d peruse worlds like ours, tales like our history, going back and forth through time itself as if years were but the number on a page! Story after story flew off the shelves into their hands to be perused, enjoyed, and returned. They filled their head with it all, with grandiose moments and favored individuals filling a mind that ached for more…
But soon enough, they started to wonder and imagine beyond what they’d read. Their head had soon become a library in itself, except the boundaries between stories were much thinner, making it much, much busier than any other! The Reader started asking themselves, “what if?” Bridging worlds and letting their inhabitants cross into each other in their mind, wondering how the tales would’ve turned out if they had. It wasn’t writing, of course, not yet. Nothing was on paper, but it entertained them nonetheless… And even then, at times, they couldn’t help but feel those dwelling in these tales were still making pushes of their own, even in these aimless musings. As if the Reader knew them so well they were all somehow there.
But the more they pondered, the more it all diverged. They started looking back at the stories themselves, and thinking… perhaps the authors writing them could’ve taken another path. Whether out of a sense of fairness here and there, or a feeling of missed opportunity, or out of sheer curiosity. They found themselves outright disagreeing with these paths, in small but important places. Not that they knew it at the time; they just thought they had some doubts as to the so-called plots before them.
And of course, there were the endings. The Reader kept finding them dull and dragging, or sudden to the point of unfairness, or finding them to be no ending at all. It was only natural for tales that cover whole worlds, which die either slowly and agonizingly, or suddenly and violently… and of course, there were those that simply froze in place, never to finish their turns, as the Author moved on to the next. A world cannot spin without a quill to trace its path. But the Reader refused to accept this. They wanted to know more, see more! They loved these stories around them as stories, and critiqued them as such, even as things they considered mere repetitive themes proved to be the simple natural conclusion of how these things go, ones the Authors didn’t bother to push past. They either couldn’t, or wouldn’t grasp this…
They never really would. The moment the Reader went back to the first Author they encountered to ask why one ending or another had turned out such, or why they’d thrown a given tale aside without ever finishing it? All they got was fury. None of these creators had ever been questioned beyond people of their making philosophizing deeply and with great worry, speculating at the void beyond the paper. To be directly questioned to their face, for the first time, they could not take. How dare they, the Author yelled. How dare this upstart question how a world is written, the paths they made for those that dwell in it. This is their world. These are their people, and they decide what happens to them, because they know them best. Who was this upstart to decide otherwise, someone that had never put pen to paper? And the Reader’s answer, that they’d actually seen the work of others enough to compare, to see the common mistakes, only incensed them further still! Pages flew and were thrown to and fro to go with the accusations, with the insults, with all that comes from the worst of arguments[5]…
Eventually, the Reader turned away, and the Author went back to their work, thinking they’d taught them a lesson. But little did they know that they’d just ensured said Reader would be an Author too, one that would claim these creations as their own if they were just going to shelf them forever, some unfinished.
They started prowling the halls, scouring the shelves, going for those tales that never truly ended, or were left lingering in a twilight, or came to end in a way they despised. And they’d cut into the book itself, and start slipping their own pages in-between, adding just enough to steer things towards a different end. Adding just enough of an epilogue to leave them open to a continuation, later. They would even tear out whole pages, dismantle parts of the world and the tale within, to take control of each narrative – because sometimes, the inhabitants just wouldn’t yield to their quill until the tale itself broke.
All the better for them. With the torn pages, stolen paper from the Authors, and even whole books snatched from the shelves when they were not looking, they would construct a grand work of their own. A singular sequel to everything they’d edited and torn and snatched, piled together into one grand heap of disorganized but passionate pages, where all those individuals they had found memorable could finally meet! Where entire worlds were bridged together, to cooperate and be troubled by each other in turn, with a billion moving parts that they could take control of and let go at will! A glorious undertaking, one they would immensely enjoy…
And one they would never realize was too big for them, or anyone.
Keeping track of so many worlds and their individuals at once turned it all into a morass. No book would coalesce from it, and it would remain a grand heap of scattered pages, scarcely bound, and often merely stacked upon one another or even heaped in piles! The setting became more bridge than world, as the locations themselves mashed together from the Reader’s failure to address them until it was too late. Time would skip back and forth until it was but an indistinct mass with little beginning or end, all of it moving forwards constantly, yet unevenly. And yet, whenever they could get back to one of the threads lost within this tangled skein, they couldn’t help but love every moment of pushing it forwards, especially for those that had just sprouted from the whole rather than being taken from another…
The Reader remains there to this day. Too willful to stop spreading this heap’s pages across the library, of letting more and more worlds be joined by sequel into the ever-growing, ever-more-tangled pile of raw story. Too ambitious to take the time to trim and streamline it all, give it actual clarity through excision. And too happy with the results to ever quit.
[1]I admit some minor artistic license here, as the wording used was closer to “book collection” than library, with an implication of ownership that never truly comes up again.
[2]Pre-Refuge material indicates the Vezarym’s original dwelling, Tirravzi, had a spherical shape (one of many in its realm), and its rotations were used to measure time, with the dwelling “spinning” being a common figure of speech to denote that time, life and history goes on. I understand this is a fairly common form of realm distribution outside the Subterraneum, but I felt the need to clarify.
[3]Almost all of the versions I found used gender-neutral terms to refer to this entity, with a general tendency towards “playing it safe” in terms of pronouns, leading me to believe this being’s gender was completely unknown or not applicable in the least. Those who strayed from this used male pronouns, which the Vezarym language tends to default to, reinforcing my claim.
[4]The word used here and elsewhere in most versions would literally translate to “manuscript”, not quite “book” (by Vezarym definitions it’s not a book until it’s physically bound), but quite a few of these versions made an aside to note how imperfect the word was, even if this was technically a story (meta)physically written by hand.
[5]More than one version tried to elaborate on said accusations and insults, but I could find no real common ground between them other than the Author’s arrogance being in greater display.
-Excerpt from “Who is the Lord Below? A Treatise on the Radiant and Cthonic”, authored by ‘the Ever-Restless Nirrhamidh’ (assumed pseudonym; author not yet identified and under active investigation)
