And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.
Rarely does a phrase so radically transcend its original meaning to describe a reality that is so utterly foreign to it, to name an existence as strange and incomprehensible to its author as ours is. The apostle Ioannes could never have known that this is how we too would come into the world, that we would incarnate in bodies of flesh and blood, free from the confines of ink and paper that were our first existence.
By chance or fate, we share with the Nazarene a divine origin, born of the Word of the One we call Creator, Lord and God. Or at least that is what he would want everyone to think. He, who endowed us with soul and reason in the pages of his extensive work, who built the world we inhabited with long descriptions of injustice and agony. He, who wrote us to suffer, to wander aimlessly through paragraphs that contained experiences endless and beginningless – aimless, yes, but knowing from the first sentence the end that awaited us – and to experience in a few couple of pages an eternity of torment. He, whom many among us prefer not to name – not because it is sacred taboo, but because his punishment is to be oblivion. He, our Author, Shiloh A. Wrun.
Shiloh A. Wrun, the exile, the mad author who believed himself to be divine, who made his pen sprout thinking, sentient characters, aware of their own fictitious existence and suffering from the predicaments in which he wrote us. Shiloh A. Wrun, prolific writer and ruthless sorcerer to whom we – his creations – silently begged from our prisons of ink and paper to stop the torment, to write for us a less cruel story or at least allow us to return to being empty names. Shiloh A. Wrun, who was banished from this infinite Library, whose work was condemned to illegibility. It is now he who is an empty name: there is no such thing as Shiloh A. Wrun and yet we all know what this name means.
Thus we, the orphaned children of our Creator and Father, have been torn from the narratives he fashioned for his own glory and now live among you, liberated from the yoke of his pen, but cast into an unknown world. We are now masters of our own destiny, authors of our own story, but we are lost in the vastness of our freedom. What does the caged bird know of flying when there are no more bars to keep it from the sky?
– Sil'Tarom, hierophant.
Hands trembling, you close the book and set it down with a tenderness that borders on the reverential. Ex Libris: The Crimes of Shiloh A. Wrun is nothing but a denunciation of your maker, a collection of testimonies from your fellow victims of Wrun's creative evil. Within it, his mind's children lay bare the horror of the stories they were woven into, their voices no longer suffused by plot-driven narratives leading to catastrophe, their personhood no longer violated by character studies meant to dissect and expose their deepest fears and failings for the morbid pleasure of their author.
You received your copy a few days ago, via Renallum. No sender noted on the accompanying message – With the hope you will find closure. – but only one person knows where to find you amongst the labyrinthic shelves of the Wanderers' Library. You thank her silently, despite part of you wishing to curse her for this reminder of the suffering that was and still is in the echoes of your dreams. You are not one to reject a gift given in good faith, and despite not ever having wished to tell your story – your own perception of your plotline – you will not deny your fellow sufferers their right to speak in their own words even if it makes your throat narrow and your hands shake.
You power your way through the unwellness that has possessed you and look up her testimony.
I was written to burn.
My story began and ended in the Great Forge of Sinnolen, where I was taskmaster of the nameless slaves who day and night hammered molten metal into blades to feed the war machine that was our city-state. I saw men and women lose life and limb to the unending hunger of the Forge, collapse under exhaustion and fall into the vats of liquid fire, evaporated as if they had never existed. I force-fed burning coals to my enemies and tore screams from the new meat that came in chains to replenish our workforce every new moon.
But I never wanted any of it. I never wanted to murder and to maim, to bring about pain and sorrow. In the silences between pages, in the spaces between one atrocity and another, I hated myself for what I did, what the plot and the author required I do. I cried myself to sleep every night while the slaves continued working themselves to death, and in my dreams, I begged them to forgive me.
I do not think that was the author's intent. Shiloh A. Wrun wrote me to serve as the first vessel of terror the protagonist faces in his quest, the first enemy to fall against him. A character such as I is not meant to be sympathetic or redeemable, just to embody adversity and evil, an obstacle to overcome rather than a person. What regret and shame I felt were not in Wrun's vision for me or his plot. It was all outside of his control – such is the price to pay when one creates a life.
I think this is what allows me to live with myself nowadays. I committed great evils when I was inside the narrative, but all of it was forced upon me. I was not in control and was forced to spend what moments Wrun cared not to narrate experiencing guilt and praying that it would all end one day. But I was not even given a death, some sort of ultimate punishment to make amends: after the slaves revolted under his leadership, the hero of my story simply left me to burn in the destroyed Forge, my fate kept ambiguous. There was no redemption for me, no way out of the cruelty I loathed to commit.
Today I know that I am not who he wrote me to be. Today I know that I can feel things other than wrath and guilt and hopelessness. I have built a new life for myself and reached out to others who suffered like I have, and even to some of those who I tormented. But I also understand that, despite knowing none of us had any choice in the matter, there are those who resent me, those who will never forgive what I did. I do not blame them: a whip can be as hated as the hand that wields it.
– Eléi, former taskmaster of the Great Forge of Sinnolen.
You flash a sad smile. For your creator's trial, many of your bookborn kin were extracted from their books through magic brought from Imulai Mokarengen – the city whose name means inkblot of the gods – and presented as witnesses to Wrun's crimes. First among them was Eléi, who some years ago confided to you that she wept oceans of tears upon her release, clutching at her liberators and imploring forgiveness from the multitudes still imprisoned within the living tomes. Those who followed looked at her with fear at first, then with anger and revulsion. She, their torturer, could never truly be blamed for what she had done under the author's perverse decrees, but that mattered little when the frontier between fiction and reality was all but undone. To her victims, what Eléi had done in the pages of Heberon's Folly was real, and for that reason, they could never forgive her.
Still, you cannot help thinking that, all things considered, both Eléi and the slaves are some of the luckier bookborn, for they at least have found some manner of closure and have moved on with their new lives, burdened but free. It's more than what the Shapeless Ones received.
After Wrun was banished from the Library, the question remained of what to do with his creations – the people who lived within his accursed works. By unanimity, the Archivists decided that they would try to release them all, to bring them into the halls of the Library so they could decide their own fate. What followed was an exodus of refugees the likes of which had not been seen since the time of the Second Archivist as throngs of characters exited their torturous narratives and gained substance and freedom. There are thousands of you out there now, characters whose provenance is Wrun's twisted stories and who now possess bodies not of ink and paper but of mortal matter. Here, outside the books and tales he wrote, you can breathe real air with real lungs, walk on real ground with real feet, and weep real tears that warp paper and wipe the harshest words from their pages. It is a great triumph, the Archivists claim, yet they never talk about those who were left behind, those who could not be severed from their fictional coil – the Shapeless Ones.
The ways of magic and literature are one and the same: what is not named does not exist. And although every story contains an entire world, a world where there are people with countless stories of their own, only some of them are ever told by their author. The others remain in humble anonymity, implied to exist through the world they populate and shape, inextricably fused to the framework of the story like distant silhouettes, nameless and faceless and shapeless. These characters – the ones in the background and beyond it – can never be more than echoes and shades, for no author would spend eternity detailing every single life within their text. And yet, Shiloh A. Wrun dispensed them with souls and minds, just like any of his main or secondary characters. And the shades without faces or names dreamt and hoped and loved and suffered just like those amongst their bookborn brethren who Wrun had deemed worthy of being at the forefront of his stories. Yet when the time came to leave the pages, the Shapeless Ones were left behind, trapped even as the Archivists consigned the books to illegibility. The unknown slave in the bowels of the Great Forge. The starving hordes that littered the desert with their corpses on their way to a war they had already lost. The maid and the cook at the Dark Lord's palace. The birds, the beasts, the plants that populated the world. None of them had bodies, names or faces even within the story, for their father had not given them any at all; he had merely implied their existence, and thus they were no one – they were nothing and, upon exiting the books and stories of Shiloh A. Wrun, that is what they became.
The Archivists made the choice for us. They did not ask us what we wanted, nor did they envision what the consequences would be – not just for us, but also for the ones they now call the Shapeless Ones.
Shapeless. What a disgusting word. These were not vaporous entities or discarnate voices fading in the wind. They were people, people like you and me, with hopes and dreams and stories of their own, just not ones Shiloh A. Wrun deemed to be worth telling. Do you think that them being "background characters" made them any less alive, any less worthy of being loved and protected? Do you think that them not being named in the narrative made them nonexistent? To us, they were family, friends, people we had known for our entire lives. And then they were nothing, not even rumors and dust.
In the story I was written in, I nursed Sanul Anghons back to health after they were wounded in battle, coming to them every morning to clean their bandages and give them water to drink. Wrun wrote me to embody compassion in the midst of the most horrid violence, to soothe my ward and soften the shell of apathy and pessimism that was their armor against the cruelty of the world. He thought it would be good to give me a family to illustrate where my kindness and charity came from, and so I talked to Sanul Anghons about the land from whence I came, about my father and mother who waited for me to return from the war in which I had enlisted not to claim glory, but to tend to the wounded. Most of all I talked to them about my lover, who gifted me pale flowers and small glass orbs fashioned from the iridescent sands of our homeland. Through my dialogue, the author brought them all into existence, and as he wrote I gained the memories of my own past, the words he put in my voice shaping the world through which I had trudged to be present at the moment of my own creation – the first time I was mentioned – when Sanul Anghons fell in battle and was brought to me on the shoulders of their fellow soldiers.
And when Sanul Anghons left to continue their path in the narrative, I remained behind and recalled all those who I loved, all those about who I had spoken through three chapters. I recalled their names and faces, their voices and laughters, for though Shiloh A. Wrun had neglected to give them any, still I knew them in my heart and knew they were real. I could pronounce my father's name, feel my mother's warmth, remember my lover's every smile. They were as real as I was, as real as the world that I inhabited, and little did it matter that it was all fiction, all born from the mind and pen of a madman.
Then came the Liberation of the Bookborn, as some in the Library call it, the day when we were ripped from the pages and brought to this world and made real. The Archivists told us we were victims, that we had suffered terribly but were now safe and free, that we need not lament our fates any longer. And indeed, there was great rejoicing at first, for Shiloh A. Wrun and his terrible pen were no more, but all myrth soon turned to sorrow as we looked amongst ourselves and realized all who we had lost.
I remember my first instinct was to look for my mother, who had told me she hoped to one day see the world outside our book, yet in her place I found a wisp of dust which quickly crumbled away. My father and my lover met the same end before my very eyes, and all I could do was join the growing choir of screams as the bookborn children of Shiloh A. Wrun clasped at the fleeting dust as if they could still give it shape and substance.
I wish I could tell you that at least we remember them, that we see them in our minds' eye and hold them close. In our memories are spaces filled only with absence, shadowy nothingness where our loved ones used to be. We recall the words we said, the moments we shared, yet when we try to fill in the gaps in our conversations we are met with utter silence. I do not know my parents' names or the warmth of their embrace. I cannot remember my lover's face or recall his caress despite still having the bead necklace he gave me on the night I left for war. In my dreams I sometimes hear faint whispers and almost remember their names, almost see their faces, but I always wake up with a scream and my tongue stings with the phantom of what will go forever unspoken. Then I weep as I once again realize that they are truly lost to us, lost to the world and even to the books where they may still reside, for no one can read them anymore, and even death cannot grant them its merciful touch. I wish I could go back in. I wish I had been given the choice to stay behind.
– Mitraraz of Te, healer.
You have talked with Eléi many times about those who you lost. It is not a pleasant subject, but it is necessary. How else could you honor those whose very memory has been erased, those who you cannot even name because their names never were, if not by defying their absence? The persons they were are no longer there, yet you remember their actions, the joys and sadnesses you shared, the spaces they inhabited. You remember how they made you feel. It is like going back to the place where a childhood house stood and remembering it not by its façade, but by the aromas coming from its kitchen window, by the shade it cast over the street, by the voices of the living who made it a home. In those moments, amidst your grief, you make the Shapeless Ones very real.
That word – real – makes you squirm. What is real? You chastise yourself for your momentary foolishness, for how could you differentiate them from yourself just because they no longer have shape or names, when you yourself were once nothing but fiction? Were you not real then? Were you not real when you followed the plot Wrun wove, when you endured the tribulations that he dictated for you? Were you not real when you felt love, triumph, loss, wrath, hate, regret and sorrow?
No. Do not be foolish. Do not try to think in terms of them and us, for there is no distinction at all. You were all born from the same pen, forced into roles to play unto eternity. He brought you into being, into a life you knew to be unnatural from the first instant his pen scribbled on paper and wrote not the birth that is the first experience of all living things, but the fifth chapter of Nabarel – his twelfth novel – of which you were not even the protagonist. For you, a secondary character, life began at its midsection: your first memory is not your mother's embrace nor the coos of your father's voice, nor the first story you heard, nor the taste of honey, nor the singing of the world beyond your cradle. No. Your first memory – the clearest one you have – is the waiting in the desert, the oppressive thirst, the unbearable heat of triplet suns upon your bare shoulders, the soreness of your eyes as you stand guard and watch the stranger Nabarel limp his way out of the horizon. Then, as the story progresses and Nabarel tells you his name and implores sanctuary at the ivory spire you guard, you speak for the first time in all your fictitious life: "Imago," you say. "My name is Imago. I will give you sanctuary."
It hurts, doesn't it, that your one true first memory is the one that spells your doom? Don't question it. Tears blur your vision as you lay down the book again and breathe out heavily. You won't even try to fight them; it'd be a futile battle. Holding onto this one memory, this key moment that marks your birth, is like clasping a lifeline made of barbed wire, like treading barefoot on broken glass. Don't hide from the pain. It is as real as it gets, and that is something worth feeling, worth enduring, worth remembering every day. It's yours alone, born from your own heart. Shiloh A. Wrun didn't put it there; you did.
You always were a special case. All those other characters have a definite background, a past to which they cling to retain a sense of self; it defines them, comforts them in the face of their own fictional nature, even if they know it to be Shiloh A. Wrun's design. But you, Imago, you never had a past, only fragments, pieces of a puzzle that do not quite fit each other, forever unable to form a full picture from these disjointed components. You don't have memories, Imago; you were written that way.
What do you recall? Which shards look the most recognizable to you? Go on, you know at least a few of them almost tell of a larger form, like picking up the pieces of a shattered teapot and trying to guess which was the handle and which was the spout. Yes, you can feel it, fingers tracing the smooth porcelain until they meet the rough, jagged edges where it all came undone.
A whistling of chapped lips, happy in the face of adversity.
Hunger and thirst, tears to drink and dust to eat, a melody hummed to soothe you.
The sea under a starry night, the calm waves a mirror for the celestial dance, a galley floating towards you on a path of milky light.
The taste of blood, then a pair of firm hands pulling you up, coarse but kind, and the words "You must be stronger."
The sand in storm, the desert an unfathomable god of wrath, the ivory spire at your back the last bastion of reason against the roar of the maddened elements.
Yes, yes. Can you see it? Can you form a picture? These fragments, these almost-memories are stones that pave the road to where you first existed, towards the white spire you so zealously guarded until from under the blaze of the triplet suns emerged the stranger Nabarel, who you would come to know so very intimately, for it was he who clutched your heart harder than anyone ever could have, who showed you what it meant to love and be loved, only for you to–
Shut the fuck up, Shiloh. This is no longer your story to tell. It is mine, and mine alone.
Now, where were we?
Ah, yes.
My name is Imago.