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Faint protests of reality hummed their unnatural yet synchronized tones from every corner of the island—if it could still be called one after layers of planked expansions supported by pillars of contradictions had graced it with the chance to become something more.
Leifwood was its name, and though once nothing more than another complacent island, isolated and ignorant, it had come to lay claim to the invaluable gift of scriving. The artful persuasion of reality permeated the now bustling towns of Leifwood, propelling carriages to fall uphill, crops to flower in death, and glass to harden like steel. Countless individuals within Leifwood lead lives dedicated to furthering this science, vying to reach the next great milestone, be it convincing air to harden like steps underfoot, stretching minutes into hours, or even conquering death entirely. Competition breeds innovation, and the labor of the collective Leifwood mind has time and time again advanced the convenience and wellbeing of its contributors, earning them a comfortable standing in a world where civilizations wage wars with and over the simplest of scriving innovations.
Though the original land of the island is now dwarfed by its expansions—swaths of wood and stone scrived to assert to the world and to themselves that they are, in fact, and have always been, anchored to the sea floor and inseparable from the identity of the core island—the communities of the island remain congenial; a palpable air of dedication to the whole of the island permeates every street, shop, and heart. Far above it all, the clocktower signals the waning morning.
Drawing the chain from her apron, Quelo consulted her watch; it captivated her concentration for an unusual length of time, given her stature of one of the island's most prolific scriving minds; however, she had good reason to be proud. The watch held not only the hour, but a brilliant example of Quelo’s own work: the watch itself was no thicker than a coin, contained no gears or springs, and yet never gained or lost a second. This, of course, was due to the carefully inscribed lettering within the device. Through these scrived commands, Quelo had not only convinced the thin case that it had the durability of something much thicker, but also that the watch’s hands shared an identity with those that hung in the clock tower outside the workshop, thereby bypassing the need for a mechanical movement entirely while allowing the watch to keep perfect time.
The clocktower itself operated in a not dissimilar way: through the power of the scrived inscriptions within it, its hands perfectly echoed back the position of the sun, tracking across the tower’s face day after day with absolute precision—for for all they knew, they were inseparable from the sun, though a series of ancillary scrivings assured them that they did not also replicate the sun’s heat.
Quelo returned her watch to its pocket, and her focus to her work: a commission that demanded she augment a blind client’s cane to function as an extension of the mind, relaying sensory details of whatever it touched directly to him. Quelo had contemplated suggesting instead a device that would permit the man to see, but decided against it, as the task of crafting such an apparatus would undoubtedly fall on her. She wasn’t one to shy away from a challenge, but sight-enabling scriving designs were extremely complex, not to mention fiercely proprietary to the powerful house names overseas. She would complete the cane, Quelo decided. But what approach to take? Her wrinkled face creased as she bent over her workbench, populated with scriving tools, sheafs of paper, the unfolded scriving order, and in the center, drawing her concentration, the yet modified cane.
It was a blank slate, simple in concept but elegant in its lacquered wood design. Quelo could convince it to become any number of things; perhaps the most straightforward would be to simply code the object as a brand new appendage, though that would likely take up more writing space than the cane had available. Quelo’s client had specifically requested that the applied scrivings be unobtrusive, relegated only to a knuckle-wide series of rings below the head of the cane.
Quelo had scoffed at the limitation. Scriving in her mind was an artform—not a mere addition to another body. It should be interwoven with the object, acknowledged for its effort in shaping reality, and most of all, respected for its service—especially in a case such as this. Why some would consider scrived script to be unsightly was beyond her.
Nevertheless, she continued pondering the problem. Due to the limited space, Quelo asserted that the most efficient course of action would be to treat the cane as an extension of the arm holding it. This way, the man would be able to maneuver his way around the streets of wherever it was he came from—Quelo couldn’t remember seeing the man around Leifwood before—with a respectable stance, but the awareness of feeling thoroughly along the path before him. Satisfied with the solution, Quelo turned to ready her tools, but stopped mid-reach. Thinking over the plan, she realized that it might be pertinent to build in some safeguards that dulled the connection between cane and hand. Her client (and reputation) likely wouldn’t appreciate it if damage to the cane was instantly replicated in the hand; having brushed a fallen barb or hot liquid, the cane should alert the man, but no go so far as to mangle his hand as if it had closed a fist around the harmful object itself. Quelo hunched over the desk and made a note. A one-to-one connection between the scrived object and the user would not be the optimal solution in this case.
No sooner had Quelo finished writing when she was met with a crash from the far wall of her workshop. Quelo’s protege, A boy of 12, was there experimenting with a scriving of his own—what looked from Quelo’s vantage point to be a metallic orb now settled amid scraps of fallen wood, splintered from the impact point on the wall.
As the boy fished the orb from the rubble, the scrived wood reassessed itself. It was supposed to be part of a strong wall. It had to be.
And so it was.
The boy glanced back to see the wood reforming where it lay, coalescing into larger planks, then gravitating back to slot into the wall, as structurally sound as it had been before. The boy didn’t linger on the sight; his position under Quelo had all but desensitized him to the seemingly impossible effects of Scriving. Quelo, however, never grew tired of such things and crossed the room.
“I should be mad,” Quelo chuckled, “but I’ll take any excuse to see those walls in action.” Her smile turned. “That being said, what happened, Pring?”
“How would I get this to… fly? The child asked, somewhat reserved.
Pring explained his aim: he wanted to create a device that, when manipulated in his hand, translated its movement to another, larger object in open air. He had been holding a palm-sized replica of the larger metal orb, but when he activated the scrivings linking the two, the larger metal sphere had lurched forward, smashing into the wall.
Quelo suspected why this was, but instead took the opportunity to ask her pupil a question: “Pring, what are scrivings?”
Confused by the relevancy of the question, Pring answered with a tilt of his head.
Quelo patiently asked again, “I’d like you to tell me.”
Pring searched his mind and retrieved the mantra instilled by schools the world over: “Scrivings let us shape the world. They are tools we use to make life easier and bring the future closer.”
Pring felt a confidence upon reciting the precept, but Quelo shook her head. “Scrivings are much more than tools, Pring. To understand how to master their potential,” she glanced at her scratched reflection in the orb Pring cradled, “we have to work with them. Respect them. Learn from them.” She shifted in place, gazing out a window to see men loading crates into an impatient ship. “For all that colorless talk about scriving, have you learned about the history of this island? The real history, before scriving?” Pring followed his mentor’s gaze, squinting out at the busy wharf.
Before scriving? Most of his lessons in school centered around the uses of scriving and their current applications within Leifwood. There was a history class, but its teacher only ever spoke of scriving innovations, never the advent of the practice itself. He looked at Quelo and shook his head. Quelo didn’t turn from the window, but her face softened. “Come on, Pring,” she broke her eyes away from the wharf and gestured to the rug spanning a section of wood-slatted flooring, “Sit for a bit.”
Quelo and Pring settled down. As the elder took some scriving tools and both orbs into the ruffled apron spanning her lap and started tinkering, she began:
“My great grandfather, about 100 years ago, lived right here, on the island. It would have looked very different back then though; none of these expansions yet,” she gestured vaguely, “just a small island, alone on the sea. No one, at least no one here, knew about scriving in those days. They couldn’t convince reality to be anything it wasn’t back then. Carts rolled downhill, crops were tended to by hand, glass shattered. It was a simpler time to be sure, but they didn’t know that. For our ancestors, my great grandfather, that was life. That was all there was, and for all they knew, that was all there ever would be.”
Quelo focused intently on the smaller of the two orbs, scratching new sigils into its surface.
“Scriving did exist back then though. It always has, in one form or another. Those powerful merchant houses overseas just controlled all of it. Their huge ships would pass by islands like this, and people would always gawk at them. ‘How can they make ships that big?’ ‘How in the world…’”
Quelo paused her work to look up at Pring. Gauging his expression as one of interest, she continued,
“of course, they couldn’t make ships that big. Not alone anyway. Those things were held together by millions of commands, all working together to keep their boats on the water and their dynasties intact. And they coveted those designs,” Quelo added. “They were even more secretive about their scriving techniques then than they are now, not that they’ve ever given us much.” She paused again, glanced back at her desk where the cane sat, and scoffed. “Except of course customers.”
Pring glanced up from his work, now in Quelo’s lap, to her face with a questioning look. “What happened, then? If the merchant houses kept everything so secret, how did we figure out all of…this?” He gestured about the space, referring to everything he had ever known: scrivings were a part of life, he thought. How could people just… not know about them? The boy’s old mentor creaked a smile.
“Something wonderful. The story’s been passed down for generations, starting with my great grandfather, but essentially…” her smile deepened as she continued, “one day, one of those great big merchant ships was passing by. The houses never came too close to the island, and they definitely didn’t interact with us, but that day was different. No one knows why, but as the story goes, someone saw an object flying out from the ship toward Leifwood. They kept expecting it to arc down, to land in the sea, but it didn’t. It kept on flying as if there was no wind—no gravity at all, all the way to the shore. Those people, our ancestors, they all gathered around the thing, and they say—well, they say it was just a paper bird! A single sheet folded into a little dove.” Quelo stopped to look down at her scrivings, then back up at Pring.
“Can you imagine? It must have flown for over a mile! No one had ever seen a thing like it.” Quelo continued, “our people unfolded that bird, and what they found changed our very way of life. You see, written on that paper were two things. First, a strange alphabet no one had ever seen. Second, a series of sentences written using that alphabet.”
Quelo took on a prideful expression, turning her attention back to the scrived orbs. “My great grandfather spent his life deciphering that letter, and although no one ever knew who sent it or why, he did figure out what it was. That bird was the first scrived object to touch our island. It was under command by its sigils to fly straight, believing that it was falling to earth as a stone rather than soaring across the ocean as a scrap of paper. That was but one example of the capabilities of the alphabet. As my great grandfather discovered, the runes could be used for any number of things. With the help of that alphabet, he learned to interface with reality, molding it to the needs of his people. He spread the knowledge of scriving across our island and kickstarted its evolution, starting by expanding outward with platforms that believe to this day that they share the island’s bedrock.”
Quelo turned and set aside the orbs. “That paper dove graced us with the chance to become something more than what we were, but things could have been different. Our ancestors could have taken that gift and used it to create terrible things like so many others have. The houses overseas, warping reality to destroy itself rather than teaching it new ways to stretch beyond its natural limitations. That’s what scriving is all about, Pring. We may coax reality into new shapes, but we never turn it against itself. That fundamental lesson drives our success. We work with nature to achieve our goals. We guide and shape it, perhaps streign it at times, but we do not break it. In return, we are elevated as a people.”
Quelo lifted the scrived spheres to Pring, one in each hand. Pring grasped the smaller of the two and carefully activated the modified scriving, slowly raising the ball above his head. As he looked on in awe, the larger orb, still sitting in his mentor’s hand, began to rise, mimicking the movement of the first.
The problem had been one easily overlooked. The orb intended to mirror the first was scrived to assume that it was the first in nearly all respects; however, because it was much larger than the one it copied, any movement the smaller orb made was translated with a much greater speed to the larger one. To remedy this, Quelo directed both orbs to interpret elements of each other’s position as their own. The orbs learned from each other, channeled each other, both contributing to the effect and stabilizing the conversation between their scrived surfaces and the reality around them.
Through this exchange, they took flight.