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Inklings
See also: The Ink Well · InkKeepers · ReedKin · InkDrinkers · The Void
"Every bottle's full of wee lives, love. Treat the ink kindly and it'll treat your story kindly back."
-- Ossian OakGall - InkKeeper of the Lower Keep
Classification: Creature of magic. Primary range: the Ink Well, and every written page in Threadbare. Diet: ideas.
Tiny, microbial creatures of magic that live in the ink, deep in the Ink Well. When the ink is drawn, these creatures remain in the extracted liquid, destined to live in the words on the pages of books for eternity. Their magic, the energy exchange of ideation for writers.
Inklings swim in their billions through the depths of The Ink Well, and in every spring, bottle, and drop the InkKeepers carry out into Threadbare. No one has ever seen a single Inkling. Everyone who has ever written something has felt one.
An Inkling is far too small to see. Scholars at the The University of the Unseen have tried with their finest lenses and seen only ink. What they have learned instead comes from watching the Well itself.
On still nights, the surface of the Well carries a faint, restless shimmer, like breath on a cold window, and it is brightest when someone nearby is thinking hard. A freshly opened bottle sometimes seems to glint just before the first word is written. And ink that has sat corked and unused for too long goes dull and sluggish, as if whatever lives in it has fallen asleep.
The InkKeepers say Inklings are neither clever nor foolish, and have no wishes of their own except one: to become part of a story.
When the colours are woken from the black in the Climb, the Inklings wake with them, and each colour's Inklings are said to have their own temper: the red restless, the gold generous, the blue patient. InkKeepers are forever arguing about which colour suits which kind of story.
Inklings live on ideas. That is the whole of the exchange, and it is the oldest bargain in Threadbare.
A writer brings a thought to the page, however small or unfinished. The Inklings in the ink take it up, and in return they give back a spark: the next word, the better phrase, the ending that arrives just when the writer had given up on it. The thought feeds the Inklings, and the Inklings finish the thought. Neither could make a sentence alone.
This, the InkKeepers say, explains a great deal:
- Why a blank page is so hard to start. The Inklings are waiting. They cannot give anything until they have been given something first.
- Why ideas come faster once you begin. Every word written wakes a few more Inklings, and they wake their neighbours.
- Why a stuck story sometimes needs a rest. Sleepy ink needs time. An InkKeeper will tell a frustrated Yarnlings to leave the bottle open by the fire for an evening, and tell it a story or two before trying again.
Once ink becomes a word, its Inklings stay there, in that word, for as long as the page survives. A finished book, the InkKeepers say, is not quiet at all. It is a city of Inklings, each one settled into its own letter, each one holding a little of the idea that put it there.
That is why reading can make someone want to write. When a reader takes in a page, a little of the spark passes the other way, from the Inklings in the words to the mind of the one reading them. The idea that fed them once feeds someone new. Some InkKeepers call this the second half of the exchange, and say it is the more important one.
The oldest Inklings of all are said to live in the stitch-script of the ReedKin's standing stones, in the very first line anyone ever wrote. Some InkKeepers believe every Inkling in Threadbare is descended from those few, which is why they still whisper beside the stones. The first Inklings are still listening.
When the Void reaches the Ink Well and a pool thins to grey and then runs clear, it is not only the colour that has gone. A clear pool holds no Inklings, and nothing written with its water will ever quite take.
The InkDrinkers are worse. When they sink their needled mouths into a page and drain a sentence from the inside out, the Inklings go with the ink. Whether they are destroyed, or carried off, or simply lost somewhere in the Void, no one knows. The InkKeepers do not like to talk about it. Whatever becomes of them, they are not in the blobs the InkDrinkers squirt. That ink keeps its colour and not one Inkling, which is why a splatter of hollow ink, however bright, will never make a word.
What the InkKeepers do know is that copying helps. When Yarnlings on copy-nights recopy a fading line onto new cloth, the fresh Inklings in the new ink take up the old idea and hold it again. A story copied is a story given new lives to carry it.
"I have looked for them through every lens the University owns. I have never seen one. But I have never once finished a paragraph without them, either."
-- Tamsin TallyStitch - Observist of the University of the Unseen
Inklings are never met as characters. They are felt in every act of writing the StoryWeaver helps with or sees, and contributors should treat them as the quiet magic behind every good idea that seems to arrive from nowhere.
For contributors, Inklings are a way of talking about the creative process itself: that ideas grow when shared, that starting is the hardest part, that a rest can unstick a story, and that reading and writing feed each other. Every page written for Threadbare is, in a sense, a new home for them.
- The Ink Well - their home, and the source of all ink
- InkKeepers - who draw, bottle, and carry them across Threadbare
- ReedKin - whose stitch-script holds the oldest Inklings of all
- InkDrinkers - the Void swarms that drain them from the page
- The Void - which thins the ink until nothing lives in it
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