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ReedKin
See also: The Ink Well · InkKeepers · Rune · Page · Inkling · InkDrinkers · The Everlasting Library
"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, Page, 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 in the last place they settled, The Ink Well, they found something that would change them for good: ink.
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, the oldest written language in Threadbare, and they say it is where the Weave first learned to read itself. 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.
Not every mark on the scattered stones is ReedKin work. On some of them, alongside the notches, are the deep-cut waymarks of Rune, Elder of the Eternal Loom and Carver of Memory. Whether Rune carved beside the ReedKin while they still lived there, or came to their stones long after they had gone, no one can say. Rune, when asked, has never quite answered.
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. They built low stone houses thatched with reed, and around the Well they raised the greatest ring of standing stones they had ever made. It was on these that the first words in Threadbare were ever written.
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, everything changed.
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.
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 Inkling 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.
When Page, Elder of the Eternal Loom and Keeper of the LoreQuests, came to the Ink Well, he found written language already waiting for him. He learned it from the ReedKin's stones and walls, cut a reed of his own, and wrote the first story on a pressed leaf, so that writing could leave the swamp and travel.
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. No name was carved beside the first line, and none has survived in any telling. It is widely presumed that the Unsigned was one of the ReedKin.
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 to find a new home, they left the Ink Well as their home, and took the ink out into the world, so that everyone else could write too. In doing so, they became the InkKeepers.
The ReedKin were never lost. They settled one last time, and their descendants are still there.
Few Threadlings today can read stitch-script, and fewer still can carve it. It is not taught in schools, where teachers say there is barely time to teach the script everyone already uses. There are those who would let it rest, since the stories on the stones have long been copied into ink. And there are those who are working, slowly and mostly by hand, to bring it back.
Chief among them is Rune. Rune does not argue against ink. The ReedKin's discovery of it was, Rune would say, one of the finest things ever to happen in Threadbare. What Rune asks is that carving is not forgotten because of it. Ink is quick, and it travels, and it can hold a whole life. But ink fades, and it can be drunk, and stone remembers far longer. The ReedKin knew how to do both, and Rune holds that Threadbare still needs both: ink for everything worth writing, and stone for everything that must never be lost.
"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
When the InkDrinkers come to the Ink Well, they 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 standing stones are a different matter. An InkDrinker can drink the ink from a notch, and many have, but the notch itself remains. This is why the marks on the stones have outlasted every swarm anyone can remember, even as the ink in them has thinned and the knowing of what they say has faded. The carving kept the shape of the words. It is the reading that must be recovered, and that, Rune says, is exactly why carving must be kept alive alongside ink.
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 and adding one line to the walls of the old ReedKin houses.
- The first line. Young writers across Threadbare still travel to the Ink Well to add a single line to the stone houses before beginning any serious work.
- The quiet at the stones. By the stones, the InkKeepers whisper. At the Keep, they roar.
- 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 of the Ink Well's waterways 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 standing stones at the Well make a natural place of quiet and discovery. 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 recovering meaning the Void has taken, with Rune as a natural guide. 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 - whose waymarks are found on some of the scattered stones, and who keeps carving alive
- Page - learned to write at the Ink Well, and carried writing onto leaf
- 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
- The Everlasting Library - where the ReedKin's stories are kept in copy
- Threadlings - the ReedKin were among the earliest
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