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ReedKin
See also: The Ink Well · InkKeepers · Rune · Venture · Inkling · InkDrinkers
"Every swamp they ever called home, they left a stone in. The Ink Well's the only one they never left."
- Ossian OakGall - InkKeeper of the Lower Keep
Known as: The ReedKin
Descendants: The InkKeepers
Home: The Ink Well, and before it, many swamps across Threadbare
Known for: The standing stones, stitch-script, and the first writing in ink
Core Thread: Memory
Associated with: The InkKeepers, Rune, Venture, the Inklings, the Unsigned
The ReedKin were an ancient people of Threadbare, the first to write with ink, and the ancestors of the InkKeepers. Very little is known about them for certain. They left no books and no names. What they left are stones.
The theory most widely held, and the one the InkKeepers tell as their own, is that the ReedKin were a reed people. Everything they made, they made from reeds, and so they made their homes in swamps, where reeds grew thickest. They would settle in one swamp for as long as its reeds lasted. When the reeds ran out, they moved on, found another swamp, and settled again. In every place they lived, they raised stones and carved them. And in the last place they settled, The Ink Well, they found something that would change them for good: ink.
The ReedKin were not the first to carve a meaning into stone. Long before most of Threadbare learned to write, Rune, Elder of the Eternal Loom and Carver of Memory, was cutting marks into rock. His waymarks, the first runes, speak through shape rather than words: water here, the path turns, you came this way to find someone. Rune chose stone because it lasts. Paper and cloth fray and fade within a lifetime or two. Stone holds on far longer.
The ReedKin came after. Whether they learned carving from Rune's waymarks, followed them from swamp to swamp, or were taught by Rune himself, no one can say for certain. But the InkKeepers have always said that the ReedKin carved in Rune's tradition, and the oldest ReedKin stones bear it out. Where Rune's marks pointed the way, the ReedKin's began to tell what had happened there. The waymark had become a story.
The ReedKin lived by the reed. Reeds thatched the roofs of their houses and were bound into walls, mats, baskets, cord, and the small canal boats they poled through the waterways. A good swamp could keep them for generations.
But no swamp lasts forever. In time, every reed bed thinned, then failed, and the ReedKin would gather what they could carry and go in search of the next. They did not wander for its own sake. They were a settled people who simply had to settle more than once.
In every swamp the ReedKin called home, they raised standing stones, and on those stones they carved. Their marks were rows of small notches cut along the edges of the stone, running up one side and down the other like stitching along a seam. The InkKeepers call this stitch-script, and they say it is where the Weave first learned to read itself. It is the oldest script in Threadbare, carved long before anything was ever written in ink. With it, the ReedKin recorded where they had lived, and told the stories of what happened there.
When the reeds ran out and the ReedKin moved on, their stones stayed behind. Many of those swamps have long since dried, or silted over, or been forgotten, and the stones now stand alone, dotted seemingly at random across Threadbare: in fields and forests, on hillsides and in hollows, far from any water at all. Most Threadlings pass them without a second look. Those who know what to look for can read in them the long, slow journey of the ReedKin, one home at a time.
Some of the scattered stones carry older marks than the ReedKin's own. Rune's waymarks were there first. It seems the ReedKin often chose to settle where Rune's marks already stood, perhaps because a waymark meant water here, and water meant reeds. On these stones, the ReedKin's notches run up the edges beside Rune's deeper, older cuts: the waymark and the story, side by side.
The Ink Well was the last swamp the ReedKin settled, and the only one they never left.
At first it must have looked like any other: thick with tall, hollow reeds, and good for a long stay. But the water of the Ink Well was not water. It was ink, black and blue and every colour at once, rising from a Well whose bottom no one has ever found. For a people who had always moved on when a swamp ran dry, here at last was a resource that never would.
So the ReedKin stayed. Some say they were drawn deeper into the swamp by the Tangled Temple, which was already old when they arrived. Either way, they came to make a sanctuary, not a city: a place where anyone who wished to set down a thought could come, cut a reed, dip it, and be left in peace. They built low stone houses thatched with reed, and around the Well they raised the greatest ring of standing stones they had ever made.
The reeds of the Ink Well gave the ReedKin their first pens, and some say their first pipes as well. That is why the Song Sanctuaries still call the Ink Well their quiet sister.
At the Ink Well, the ReedKin realised that their reeds could do more than roof a house or float a boat. Cut at an angle and dipped in the Well, a hollow reed would carry ink. It was the first quill, and with it came the first writing in Threadbare. Everything before had been carved.
They began with the stones. The ReedKin carved their notches as they always had, then filled them with ink, so that the stitch-script stood out black against the rock. They painted the faces of the stones with new marks of every kind: needles and spools, thimbles and shears, crescents and discs, and a long-snouted swamp beast that no one has ever seen alive. The meanings of these glyphs have long been lost. It was on these stones that the first words in Threadbare were ever written.
Then they turned to their homes. Ink was quick, where carving was slow, and with a reed in hand the ReedKin could write down not only what must be remembered forever, but everything else as well. They filled the walls of their houses floor to ceiling in ink: lists, lullabies, recipes, arguments, names. For the ReedKin, a home was not finished until its walls held a story.
The chisel never disappeared, but the quill took its place in everyday life. The ReedKin had become a people of ink.
The oldest Inklings of all are said to live in the stitch-script of the standing stones at the Ink Well, in the ink the ReedKin first laid into the notches of the very first line anyone ever wrote.
Every InkKeeper knows the toast: "To the Unsigned, who wrote it first, and left the rest of the page for us."
No one knows who the Unsigned was. The InkKeepers say the name is there on the oldest stone of the ring, in the first inked line of stitch-script, worn too faint to read. Others say the first writer never signed at all, or that there was no single first writer, only many hands dipping into the Well at once. Whichever telling is true, it is widely presumed that the Unsigned was one of the ReedKin.
When Rune, Elder of the Eternal Loom and Keeper of the LoreQuests, came to the Ink Well, he found that the people who had learned to carve from his waymarks had gone on to something new. Writing was already waiting for him on the ReedKin's stones and walls. He learned it, cut a reed of his own, and wrote the first story on a pressed leaf.
It was a small thing, and it changed everything. Stone and walls could not travel. A leaf could. For the first time, writing could leave the swamp, and so could the ink that made it. Rune encouraged the ReedKin's children to carry both out into the world, and in doing so helped turn the ReedKin's discovery into something every Threadling could share. Rune remains the Elder most closely tied to the Ink Well, and to the InkKeepers who carry its ink across Threadbare.
"A story told is a gift. A story written down is a promise that it will still be here tomorrow."
- Rune - Elder of the Eternal Loom
The ReedKin filled the stones, then the walls of their houses, and then there was nowhere left to write. For the first time, it was not the reeds that ran out, but the room. So their children did something no ReedKin had done before. Instead of moving on together to find a new home, they went out, taking the ink into the world so that everyone else could write too. In doing so, they became the InkKeepers.
No one in Threadbare today is ReedKin, and no one can say when the last Threadling called themselves by that name. The ReedKin did not end in a single moment. Their way of life faded slowly, as ways of life do. Each generation spent a little more time carrying ink to far-off places, and a little less by the stones. The InkKeepers built their Keeps out along the waterways and across the world, and fewer and fewer made their home at the heart of the Ink Well. The old ways of the ReedKin, settling where the reeds grew, carving slowly, and moving on together, were practised less and less, until the name itself fell out of use. Children who grew up bottling ink called themselves InkKeepers, and in time, there was no one left who called themselves anything else.
Ink, and the new ways of using it, had carried the InkKeepers forward. Something of the old ReedKin way was left behind.
The heart of the Ink Well is no longer a place of living. It is a place of working.
The old ReedKin houses still stand inside the ring of stones, but as ruins now. Their reed roofs are long gone, and green has crept over their walls, moss in the corners and vines across the doorways. Beneath the green, the ink is still there: lists, lullabies, recipes, arguments, names. Travellers still make the journey to see them, and to stand among the stones.
But the Well itself has never stopped working. It is still the source of all ink in Threadbare, and every day InkKeepers pole out through the mist to draw from it, filling barrels and bottles to carry back to the Keeps, and from the Keeps out to every corner of the world. They work quietly. At the Well, and among the stones, no one raises their voice, in honour of the ReedKin who once lived there. By the stones, they whisper. At the Keep, they roar.
The stories carved by the ReedKin are still there. The trouble is that almost no one can read them. Stitch-script is not taught in schools, where teachers say there is barely time to teach the script everyone already uses, and each generation, fewer can read the stones than the one before. The stories have not gone anywhere. It is the readers who are disappearing.
A few still try. Scholars from the University of the Unseen come to copy the stones, among them the Observist Tamsin TallyStitch, who has copied them for forty years. And two Elders, Rune and Venture, have begun the slow work of bringing stitch-script back: Rune keeping the old stones, and Venture teaching new readers to find their way to them.
"Paper forgets in a hundred years. Stone forgets in ten thousand. I prefer to give the world time to catch up."
- Rune - Elder of the Eternal Loom
Nothing in Threadbare is beyond the Void's reach, and stone is no exception. But stone lasts. Where paper thins and fabric frays in a season, a carved stone can hold out for an age. It is why Rune has always chosen to carve, and why he still walks the land recarving the waymarks and stones the Void has begun to wear away. And because the Void feeds on forgetting, a stone no one can read is a stone the Void will one day reach.
At the Ink Well, the InkDrinkers take lines from the old ReedKin walls, and the Keeps fill with Yarnlings, fresh quills in hand, recopying what is fading onto new cloth. The InkDrinkers drink the ink from the stitch-script too, leaving the notches pale. But the notches themselves hold on, long after the ink is gone, waiting for someone who can still read them.
Much of what the InkKeepers do, they do because the ReedKin did it first.
- The stained hand. InkKeepers' fingers are stained blue-black to the second knuckle, just as the ReedKin's were, and they never scrub it off.
- The first reed. Every apprentice begins at the Well, in silence, cutting their first reed from the same beds the ReedKin once cut.
- The first line. Young writers across Threadbare still travel to the Ink Well before beginning any serious work. The walls of the old houses have long been full, so they do as Rune once did, and write a single line on a pressed leaf or a scrap of cloth to carry home.
- The quiet at the stones. No one raises their voice at the Well or among the stones.
- The unlabelled bottle. The first bottle drawn from every new spring goes out unlabelled, in honour of the Unsigned.
- The punt routes. The small reed boats that carry InkKeepers to and from the Well are the descendants of the ReedKin's canal boats.
For the StoryWeaver, the ReedKin are the deep history of the Ink Well, and the reason the InkKeepers do what they do. The ruins and standing stones at the heart of the Well make a natural place of quiet and discovery, set within a region that is still busy with work. The scattered stones, found in almost any region of Threadbare, can reward exploration anywhere, and together tell the story of the ReedKin's journey one home at a time. Stitch-script offers a thread for LoreQuests about learning to read what others have forgotten, with Rune and Venture as natural guides. For contributors, the ReedKin are a way into the origins of writing in Threadbare, and into a question every generation asks again: when something new arrives, what do we keep of the old?
- The Ink Well - where the ReedKin settled for the last time, and the site of the great ring of standing stones
- InkKeepers - their descendants, who carried the ink out into the world
- Rune - Keeper of the LoreQuests, whose waymarks came before the ReedKin's stones, who learned to write at the Ink Well, and who keeps the old way alive
- Venture - Rune's partner in teaching stitch-script to a new generation
- The Observists - scholars who still come to copy the stones
- Inkling - the oldest live in the inked stitch-script of the standing stones
- InkDrinkers - the Void swarms that take ink from the old walls and stones
- Threadlings - the ReedKin were among the earliest
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