Scribes

Overview

The Scribes are the recorders of the Binding Song, the realm of language, law, and connection, and of the Name Bound, the zone where the Song narrows to names. They write down every word spoken and every name, live on the meaning of what they write, and enforce the laws of language without taking any side.

Appearance

A Scribe is of about Human height, thin and slightly stooped, as if always bent over a desk. Its skin is like parchment: cream to brown, fine-grained, dry, and covered with faint writing that seems to have soaked in from the surface, old lines showing through new. Its eyes are like inkwells, wells of black in which ink swirls slowly. It carries a quill that writes on the air, leaving glowing script behind it; the Scribes of the Name Bound have quills in place of fingertips, and wear robes covered in text that shifts as one reads it.

They move with a careful, unhurried precision. Their voices are dry and exact, and in the Song every word they speak rings faintly, as words do there. They smell of ink, parchment, and wax.

Habitat and Range

They live in the libraries, courts, and singing halls of the Binding Song, along its bridges of sentences and walls of laws, and in the scroll-lined archive corridors of the Name Bound, wherever words are spoken that must be kept.

Behaviour and Temperament

They record. Every word spoken in their hearing is written, and every name and every contract, and they hold the record without judgement. They are neutral judges who enforce the laws of language: a broken grammar, a false name, or a promise ill-made is corrected by them, not punished out of anger. They speak rarely and precisely, value accuracy over speed, and in the Name Bound speak only in declarations. Visitors seem to them unwritten, or blank pages.

Abilities

They do not eat; they consume meaning, stories, words, and contracts. They do not sleep; they archive memories instead. What a Scribe writes on the air holds as fact in the Song, and a name a Scribe has recorded can be read back by anyone the Scribe allows.

Life Cycle

No one has seen a young Scribe. They endure for as long as their place does: the Name Bound's Scribes for as long as the zone lasts.

Uses and Dangers

They are the keepers of every agreement made in the Song, and visitors who come to seal a contract or seek a True Name come to them. Their danger is that they keep everything: a name spoken carelessly before one is written down, and in the Name Bound what is written there can be used.

Lore and Belief

Travellers' advice from the Name Bound is not to trust the Scribes, and from the Song to speak to them only in truth; both say the same thing, that a Scribe is fair and keeps no secrets for anyone. Practitioners of Binding Magic on Caeldon, who work with names, oaths, and seals, are said to fear being written down by one more than any curse.

Where It Appears

• The Binding Song
• The Name Bound
• Writers' Guide: The Planes, The Resonant Zones