Echo-Readers

Overview

Echo-Readers are beings of the Lost Archive that have merged with its books and become the living embodiments of the stories they hold. They lure readers into particular sections of the Archive, sometimes as guides to what they seek, sometimes as traps.

Appearance

An Echo-Reader looks like a character stepped out of a book, and the book shows. A knight in armour whose edges are lines of script; a weeping girl whose dress is a turning page; an old king whose face, looked at closely, is printed. Each wears the costume of its story, and each is a little flat, a little faded at the edges, like an illustration. When it moves, pages rustle where there are no pages, and it speaks in the voice of its story, often in old-fashioned words.

Habitat and Range

Each keeps to the shelves where its book lies, and a large Archive holds many, one to a story.

Behaviour and Temperament

An Echo-Reader behaves as its story does. A tale of a guide leads; a tale of a betrayal betrays. They seek out readers, because a story wants to be read, and draw them towards their shelf, telling the reader what they most want to hear. A reader drawn into a story begins to remember it as their own life, and some do not come back out.

Abilities

They walk out of their books and back in, and can show a reader into one: a reader taken by an Echo-Reader lives the story, under the Archive's law that reading implants memory. Some can merge two books, with unstable results.

Life Cycle

They are thought to be made when a book of the Archive is read so often or so deeply that it takes on the shape of a reader. Some think that visitors turned into books, those the Archive has bound into its pages, become Echo-Readers in turn.

Uses and Dangers

A reader who knows what an Echo-Reader's story is can use it as a guide to that part of the Archive. One who does not may be written into the story.

Lore and Belief

Scholars who survived the Archive tell of the characters they met there as though they were real people, and a few believe they were.

Treasure-seekers who go in for lost spells tell of companions led into a book of old wars by an Echo-Reader and found weeks later on the Archive's floor, scarred by battles no one else remembers.

Where It Appears

• The Lost Archive