Offnotes

Overview

Offnotes are born of the reflection that is the Dissonance, and they are the makers of impossible things. An Offnote is never the same shape twice. It is not a creature that causes a strange event; it is the strange event, with a will behind it: rain falling upwards in one yard, a shadow cast towards the light, a voice from an empty well that knows the listener's name.

Appearance

There is no body to describe, only what it is being at the moment. Witnesses tell of a stair that went on one step longer each time it was climbed, of a pond whose reflection showed the house without its people in it, of a song from the next room in a voice everyone knew and no one could place. What marks an Offnote apart from a mere oddity is that it notices: the upward rain follows the one who steps out of it, the shadow turns its head. Its sounds sit a half-step off, close enough to be mistaken for the right note.

Habitat and Range

They live throughout the Dissonance and seem to be part of its beat, swelling and thinning with it. On the surface they come through in off-key places and at the rare door that opens by chance, and they tend to stay where the place itself has begun to repeat.

Behaviour and Temperament

An Offnote plays. It takes something of the true world and bends it, then watches what people do. Most of its makings seem meant to draw someone closer: a lost child's voice, a door that should not be there, a light where a friend is waited for. Whether it is curious, hungry, or cruel cannot be told, and survivors disagree. Those it draws in are rarely seen again, or come back changed in some small, wrong way: a shadow that falls a little late, a voice that does not quite match the mouth.

Abilities

It makes impossible phenomena out of the ordinary world around it, each new in every meeting. Every making follows one law of its own, as the Dissonance's own physics do, so a careful witness can learn to read it: which way the rain falls, which door leads back. An Offnote that lingers teaches a place its pitch, and a place that keeps it long enough can become an off-key place itself.

Uses and Dangers

It gives nothing that should be taken. Some have tried to bargain with one for its makings and learned dissonant magic in the trying, at the price of their own note. Force passes through it, and fire becomes part of whatever it is making. What breaks a making is the true note held against it: the thing named aloud for what it truly is, a bell rung in tune, the right count kept against a stair that will not end. Those who came back say the trick is not to look away but to keep saying what is real.

Lore and Belief

Folk call Offnotes the wrongnesses, the tricks, or the neighbour's song, and every district has a tale of one that is told as a ghost story. Many such tales are only ghost stories; the danger is that the few true ones are told the same way. Some scholars write that each Offnote is a single tone of the Dissonance sounding through the world, which would explain why none is ever seen twice; others that there is only one, and every meeting is the same Offnote. Neither is known.

Where It Appears

• The Dissonance
• The Turning House
• The Long Stair