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InkKeepers
See also: The Ink Well · ReedKin · Inklings · InkDrinkers · KnitWitches · The EverLasting Library
"Folk think we sell ink. We don't. We sell the chance that someone, someday, will read what you meant."
- Ossian OakGall - InkKeeper of the Lower Keep
Known as: The InkKeepers
Descended from: The ReedKin
Home: The Ink Well, with Keeps scattered across Threadbare
Trade: Inks, dyes, bottles, and the odd trinket
Core Thread: Memory
Associated with: The EverLasting Library, the KnitWitches of the Clothborn Coven, the University of the Unseen
Threadbare's scattered purveyors of the finest quality inks and dyes for story weaving, binding… and the odd trinket too.
The InkKeepers are the ancient custodians of the world's ink supply, and the direct descendants of the ReedKin, the patient people who first wrote in ink upon the standing stones of The Ink Well. Where the ReedKin wrote, the InkKeepers keep. They draw ink from the Well and its many springs, refine it, bottle it, and carry it to every corner of Threadbare, so that anyone with a story worth setting down has something to set it down with.
They are miners, merchants, and hosts all at once. Many still live in the Ink Well, in Keeps strung out along its waterways, though no one has made a home at the heart of the Well since the ReedKin. Wherever there is a library, a schoolroom, or a scribe, there is usually an InkKeeper not far off, with a satchel of clinking bottles and blue-black fingers to prove it.
The InkKeepers tell it simply. The ReedKin filled the stones, then the walls of their houses, and then there was nowhere left to write. So their children did the next best thing. They took the ink out into the world, so that everyone else could write too. Rune, Elder of the Eternal Loom, who had learned to write at the Well, encouraged them. As the ink travelled further, the old ReedKin ways were practised less and less, until in time there was no one left who called themselves ReedKin at all. The InkKeepers are what remained.
That choice is still at the heart of the trade. An InkKeeper may write as well as anyone, but the ink itself, they say, was never theirs to sign. It belongs to whoever needs it next. This is why the first bottle drawn from every new spring goes out unlabelled, in honour of the Unsigned, the first writer of all, whose name no one remembers.
An InkKeeper's Keep is part workshop, part shop, and part inn, and it is never, ever quiet. Keeps stand on stilts above the black water, strung with reed-chimes and lit with maple-smoke lanterns, their decks crowded with drying racks, bottle crates, and Yarnlings with half-finished stories looking for someone to hear them.
Each Keep has its own character and its own springs. The Lower Keep, kept by Ossian OakGall, sits closest to the Well and draws the deepest, oldest black. The Ferry Keep, kept by Elspeth EbonDrop, stands where the punt routes meet, and is said to have heard more stories than any library. Smaller Keeps and outposts are scattered well beyond the swamp, wherever the ink is needed.
The heart of the Ink Well is a place of work now, not of living. Every day, InkKeepers pole out through the mist to draw from the Well, past the ruins of the old ReedKin houses, and they work there quietly, in honour of the people who came before them. The InkKeepers have a saying: the Well is for writing, and the Keep is for telling. By the stones, they whisper. At the Keep, they roar.
InkKeepers deal in three things.
- Inks. Well-black is the deepest and rarest, drawn only from the Well itself, every colour held together and undivided. Spring inks come from the swamp's edges, each one a colour the ground has slowly woken, with its own shade and temperament.
- Dyes. Most colour, though, comes from the Climb. In every Keep, long strips of felt hang from the rafters with their ends in pans of well-black, and overnight the colours climb the cloth and settle into bands. These are cut, steeped, and bottled one by one. On its own, a woken colour runs. Steeped with MordantMaple bark, it holds fast to thread for good, which is why the KnitWitches of the Clothborn Coven, and every dyer in Threadbare, buy their colours from the InkKeepers. The EverLasting Library is their largest customer of all.
- The odd trinket. Reed pens, stoppers, seals, blotting cloths, and the occasional thing no one can explain. Every InkKeeper has a drawer of oddments, and every one of them swears it came with the Keep.
An InkKeeper will always ask what the ink is for. It is not nosiness, or not only. They like to match the ink to the story, and they have been known to refuse well-black to anyone who means to write a lie with it.
- The stained hand. You can always tell an InkKeeper by their fingers, stained blue-black to the second knuckle, just as the ReedKin's were. They soften it with ink-balm, but they never scrub it off. A clean-handed InkKeeper, they say, is one who has stopped working.
- The first reed. An apprentice's training begins at the Well, in silence, cutting their first reed from the same beds the ReedKin once cut. The walls of the old ReedKin houses have long been full, so, as Rune once did, they write a single line on a pressed leaf and carry it home.
- The Climb. Apprentices are taught it on their first night in a Keep. Watching the colours rise out of the black, the InkKeepers say, is how you learn that nothing is ever only one thing.
- The toast to the Unsigned. Spoken whenever a new spring is opened: "To the Unsigned, who wrote it first, and left the rest of the page for us."
- The Evening Stopper. At dusk, every spring is corked, every bottle sealed, and every lantern lit. Then the Keeps fill with stories told aloud, and The Stopper Song is sung, usually badly, always loudly.
- Copy-nights. When the InkDrinkers have taken a line from the old walls, the Keeps fill with Yarnlings, fresh quills in hand, recopying what is fading onto new cloth.
- Reading the splash. An old InkKeeper can look at a splatter of hollow ink and tell you where the swarm last fed, from its colour alone: the gold of a Library binding, the rose of a Linenville ledger, the red of KnitWitch dye.
The InkKeepers are no fighters. When the InkDrinkers come whining out of the Void, the InkKeepers protect the Well the way a beekeeper tends a hive: with WardWort on every railing, maple-smoke along the punt routes, veil-cloth over the drying lines, reed-chimes to keep the air moving, and every spring stoppered tight before dark.
Their greatest defence, though, is the loudest one. A spoken story has no ink to drink, and a Keep full of stories is the one place the InkDrinkers never trouble.
"We're no' soldiers, pet. We're housekeepers. It's only that our house happens to be the whole of written memory."
- Elspeth EbonDrop - Keepmistress of the Ferry Keep
- Ossian OakGall. InkKeeper of the Lower Keep. Warm, unhurried, and fond of calling everyone "love." Keeper of the deepest springs, and the one most likely to know what a stranger's ink is really for.
- Elspeth EbonDrop. Keepmistress of the Ferry Keep. Sharp-tongued, big-hearted, and the loudest voice in any chorus of The Stopper Song.
For the StoryWeaver, the InkKeepers are allies of Memory: suppliers, hosts, and keepers of local knowledge. Their Keeps make natural hubs in the Ink Well, places to rest, trade, hear rumours, and pick up LoreQuests. For contributors, the InkKeepers are a way into any part of Threadbare where something is written down, since wherever there is ink, an InkKeeper was probably there first.
- The Ink Well - their home, and the source of all ink
- ReedKin - their ancestors, the first to write in ink
- Rune - Elder of the Eternal Loom, who learned to write at the Ink Well and encouraged the ink out into the world
- Inklings - the tiny creatures of magic that live in every drop they bottle
- InkDrinkers - the Void swarms they keep at bay
- KnitWitches - of the Clothborn Coven; old customers for dye and veil-cloth
- The EverLasting Library - their largest customer
- Frith FrayWalker's Letter - found near the Tangled Temple, in InkKeeper waters
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