[Filter: Franelcrew, Dragoncrew, in Kilian]
I will try to explain what I know.
... It won't answer everything, but knowing Finn was involved ... I know where she lived, of course. I will take you there. Perhaps there will be more clues.
But first, my story.
[a brief pause]
It begins as you would expect.
Long ago there lived a family in the forest, the scions of generations of research. They made their home in a vast manor, its rooms full of rows upon rows of bookshelves. Miles long, they stretched, stories from all manner of time and place collected and archived and sorted and exactly in their place. They had their servants. Their assistants. And beyond, their village. A tiny little thing with no more than a dozen families, all sworn to secrecy and steeped in the mysteries of that noble house.
The master of that household was my father.
When I was very young, he took me into his study for the first time. Upon his desk there were two items; a book and an inkwell. He bid me to read the book, and so I sat in that too-large chair and did, for I had been taught to love books all my life.
It was not a normal book. It was enchanted with power beyond my skill to understand. As I read the words it drew me into itself, into the world it described as though it were reality and I a ghost within it. I could see, smell, hear every detail. I wandered through the story, observing all, but I could never touch. This was how it should be, my father said, when I closed that book and stepped away and entreated him with my astonished gaze. A new and brilliant way to tell a story, to immerse a reader as never before.
He taught me how it was done.
The magic was in the ink. My grandfather's grandfather had acquired it in his time, an artifact inkwell, imbued with strange enchantments. He established the study to better understand its abilities. I learned much, and that is for me to tell you another time, for this story takes a dark turn.
Some of my father's assistants were not content with faithful recreation. Allowing a reader to experience a tale thus -- wondrous though it may sound, it became routine in time. They wished to try more with the inkwell, to work more complex enchantments into the pages. To allow a reader to engage with the story. To create, to change, to become the master of their own fictional universe and see what results might come.
... My father agreed, at first. It seemed a logical progression. Only ... the artifact was not fully understood. Years of research yielded an unstable tome that when channeled into -- it immediately shattered the mind of the man who had volunteered to read it. I was there in the room when it happened, only ten years old. His mind broke like an egg and the ink ran free from the pages, shimmering on the floor, rejecting what they had done to it.
We wanted to end the experiment then.
The others said they had learned from their failure and could create a better iteration.
I am ashamed to say my father allowed this to progress, inch by inch, over several years. He resisted them but could not prevent them from their experiments. But when volunteers stopped being volunteers and the others began to recruit unsuspecting readers from among the village ...
He forbade it to continue. Threatened to destroy the research.
So, they ...
They argued. They reasoned. They bargained. When my father refused to budge they said they understood and respected his decision. He was their master, after all. The scion of the experiment.
Then in the night they came in the dark and slaughtered my family like sheep.
My mother -- My mother saw what was happening. She came to me, woke me and told me to be quiet. That we had to run. When we left my room I saw the bodies twisted on the stairs, bleeding in the foyer.
I never saw my father, but I can imagine what happened to him. I thought that they had won. They had the village, they had the manor, they had the research and they had the inkwell ... or so I thought.
But my mother had taken it before she fled. They could do nothing without it -- at least, that is what we believed. What this with Caoilinn means ... the symptoms she showed ... what Finnabhair was doing. I do not know what progress they made without it these past years.
They searched for us, but we avoided them in the forest. How we survived that journey I can hardly remember. We left the path and came to a road, and then from the road to the city, and within it we tried to hide ourselves as best we could.
I always knew they would find me, eventually.
-- But I would never have suspected her. Finn. She had her own family. Her own experiment. Memory manipulation. I don't know much. Only that there was some disaster and she too fled to the city to escape it. I took her in. What choice did I have? Her story was so like mine. I -- I trusted her. She was my friend.
I cannot believe this is happening.
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