I've always loved the idea that words have more power than we think - power to change the world around us, power to edit our very destiny. Some hold very little significance, and some change the lives of millions, but every word does something.

This is true of Adae and Lark's world, and it's true of ours. Authors wield tools sharper than obsidian and more volatile than flame. Use your words wisely, friends.

Happy writing!

My name is Lark Theras, and I always used to wish I was a bird.

I could spend hours sitting by the bank on the creek, just thinking about them. Y’know, birds were really pretty. They had such long wings, all of these different colours, and you’d never find two that looked the same. They got to spend all of their time flying around, never staying in the same place. That must’ve been so exciting, y’know? We had lots of different birds, during all of the seasons - even when it got cold and the frost came, the birds still flew all around. Maybe that’s how they stayed warm. The winters used to get really cold where I lived, and the summers pretty hot. We used to do all sorts of crazy things to fight the temperature, like mashing up mint berries and smearing them all over ourselves to stay cool. They’d give you a rash if you used too much, though, so you had to dilute them with water. Adae was the only one who could get the right concentrations… Anyway, the only reason I didn’t want to be a bird is because Adae said their families didn’t stay together for very long. The mom took care of the kids and stuff, but then they all flew off on their own. That just seems sad, like they don’t have a family anymore. If it weren’t for that, I’d definitely want to be a bird.

That’s like one day I was down on the creek with Adae and we were talking about the birds. Adae was really fun to talk to; he knew everything about the world. Any question I had, he could answer. I would even ask him about the rayeda, and he’d know all about it. Sometimes the stuff he told me was scary, though, and then mama would scold him, and that was only fun at first. I tried not to go to mama with the stuff I was scared about; she didn’t like talking. She was always busy helping all our neighbors, since they had lots of problems with rayeda all the time. I guess that was okay, since they all seemed to like her because of it - or, at least, they were respectful to her. That’s probably why they weren’t too mean to us, even when we caused trouble.

Anyway, Adae and I were down by the creek where the frost froze in these little patterns that repeat themselves as they get smaller and Adae always used to sit on his favorite tree with the branches that split down the center. They repeated themselves sometimes, too, and we used to count how many different splits there were in one section of the branch. It was like following a path; you started at the tree trunk, and then when it splits in two you picked one side, and then when it splits in two on that path you picked another side, and you kept going until you got to the little pink buds at the tips of the branches that were there even during winter and you knew there weren’t any new paths for you to follow yet. Adae liked counting how many times you had to choose a new path; I always just liked walking on them with my hands, taking a new path each time. You could do the same thing with the frost, but it was harder because those patterns were a lot smaller and harder to see, and leaning in really close made your nose hurt because of the cold. Whenever I would do that Adae would push the back of my head down so my face went onto the ground and my nose got all red, the ice stinging my eyes if I didn’t shut them in time. One time Adae was curious what the patterns were that I was looking at, so he leaned in really close to the frost, and I got to push his head down. His hair was pretty long, so it got covered in snow, and his face turned all red. He pretended like he was mad at me, but I knew he wasn’t. He’s only ever mad at me when I act like I’m scared to do stuff.

Mama didn’t like talking about it, but our village had lots of problems with rayeda. People never seemed to be able to get it right. Like, they’d be tired of the frost and try to start a fire on one of the branches, but they’d use the wrong word - like fleme, instead of flame - and end up causing some unraveling or something. Mama was always dealing with unraveling. She said it was because writing was dangerous, and people should really call her when they want to do something, but Adae said that was stupid and unsustainable. He thought people were just bad at using the right words, and used to spy on them while they tried; he was supposed to do this, so he could get mama if anything went wrong, but he just liked it because it meant he knew so many words. We used to practice in the forest a lot. He’d give me this look, with his brown-red hair sticking up in just the right way, and I knew that I was going to get to learn a new word or two. It was always a little scary, because we had to go out really deep into the forest since we knew we’d get in so much trouble if we were caught, but Adae never minded that. He never thought anything was fun unless there was some sort of risk to it. That’s why he didn’t like it when I was scared.

Mama and Adae used to fight a lot, especially as Adae got older. He said he ‘didn’t agree with the way mama was approaching her position.’ Adae always used big words like that. Mama was the vnir for our village; it was her job to lead the people, so they were always asking her for help with things. Not politics, or anything like that, of course; Remmens was in charge of all that stuff, and people went to him with different questions. Mama had to go light fires, or fix houses, or heal cuts. Adae said she was really good at her job, that she knew more words than anyone in all of the land, probably. But Adae was mad at her because she didn’t let the other people use them. She would punish people for using rayeda, even; she could always tell when someone had because of the shimmering imprints that the words left behind, which Adae loved reading. Adae always said that punishing people for using rayeda wasn’t ‘just.’ He thought people should be able to use their own words, so mama wouldn’t have to run around to people’s houses all the time, and so they could be ‘self-sustaining.’ But mama always got this hard look in her eye when he mentioned it, and she always told him it was too dangerous, that only responsible people could handle it. That’s why she was training Adae, because he was responsible. I didn’t think she really knew him that well. He wasn’t that responsible; he was always horsing around with me.

But anyways, whenever Adae gave me that look, the one I knew meant it was time to learn rayeda, I always got too excited and knew to run out to our special spot in the forest. The first time he thought of the idea and gave me that look, though, I didn’t know what it meant, and he had to drag me out of the house by the elbow to a shady spot where the sunlight only made a few patterns on the ground. “C’mon,” he said, with this light in his eyes that reminded me of the sun peeking through the trees. I had to run to keep up with him, and I almost tripped and fell over rocks and sticks a few times. I was pretty excited, though.

“What, what is it?” I was pretty young, then, so I didn’t really know much. We stopped and sat down on a couple of rocks, getting our nice pants dirty, but Adae didn’t care. He never cared about stuff like that.

“Alright, I’m gonna tell you about something, but you gotta promise you won’t say anything to anyone else, alright?” Adae wasn’t that old either, although he liked to think he was. His eyes were always really wide open, and his pointy nose and fast-moving mouth always made it look like he was excited about something. Well, he was almost always excited about something. I used to like to think that if he talked hard enough and fast enough, gold or gems would start pouring out of his mouth, and we’d be able to collect them and sell them to people.

“I won’t, I won’t! Whaddya talking about?” I asked him. He was really starting to get me excited too. That’s another thing Adae was good at; you were always excited when he was excited, or sad when he was sad, or curious when he was curious. Not even just me; it was like that for everyone. Adae didn’t notice, though. He never paid attention to how people reacted to him.

“No, but seriously.” He grabbed my shoulders and pulled me closer, like he was going to whisper, his eyebrows scrunching tightly. He always whispered when there was something important he wanted to say, like the world would mess it up if it heard him. “You can’t talk about it to anyone, especially mama. She’d get both of us in trouble, and we probably wouldn’t be able to come out to the woods anymore. You got that? All clear?” I was really little then, and he didn’t really trust me to keep quiet all the time. I understood him, though.

“Sure, sure, fine. What is it?” The patterns of sunlight were changing as the sun moved across the sky, and I didn’t even trace the paths, I was so interested. “C’mon, Adae, tell me!”

He leaned in even closer, checking over his shoulder to make sure we were alone. “So, y’know how mama’s always working all the time, going to people’s houses and such?” Adae’s hands moved a lot when he talked, too, almost more than his mouth.

“Uh huh.” I nodded. “So?”

“So, I found out what she does, and it is awesome. But we’re not supposed to know about it yet, since it’s pretty dangerous.” Adae smiled at the word dangerous, and I returned his crazy grin. It was hard not to smile back at him when he smiled like that.

“Does this have to do with that time when mama caught us watching her draw something on that man’s arm when he broke it, and she wouldn’t let us outside for a week?”

“Uh huh. It’s because she doesn’t want us to see what she’s doing. I followed her to Remmens’s, though, and I watched her through the window; y’know, the one above the table that you can see through if you’re on the tree? Yeah, that’s the one. It’s pretty high up, but I was fine, and I had a great view of what they were doing.” Adae acted out climbing and the position he was hanging in, making me giggle because he looked silly doing it. He smacked me on the head in response.

“What were they doing? Did they have something secret?” I didn’t really have any idea what he was talking about, but mama spent a lot of time at Remmens’s, especially since papa died. Adae said it’s because she was lonely, but I always thought that was weird, since she had us. Anyways, they were pretty good friends, almost as good as Adae and I, and she always visited him more than anyone else. He was nice enough, although his beard was oddly shaped, and he kept trying to teach Adae to build stuff. Adae said he ‘didn’t enjoy Remmens’s company very much.’ I thought Adae was jealous of him, but I never said it. Adae would have smacked me.

“Ever wondered how we make fire? Y’know, the orange red yellow flames that cook stuff?”

“Sure, sure. What about it?” He was confusing me. I was really little back then.

“Mama helped Remmens make fire to cook some pig. But now I know how she does it, and now I know how to heal scrapes and revive dead plants and all that, too!” He was getting really excited, waving his arms around and laughing. I just sat with wide eyes and watched him.

“How? How? C’mon, you’ve gotta tell!” My voice sounded a tad desperate, but I was really curious.

“Don’t worry, I will. Basically, it’s like the old man, Horans, used to tell us. About the rayeda.” His eyes got all far away with the memory, and I thought back to the weird old man. Horans used to live next to us, with his wife; she liked giving us berries from her garden, so we visited her a lot. Horans was usually there, too, stooped over some surface like a branch heavy with fruit hanging off of a tree, drawing whatever he was thinking about at the time. Adae and I looked at his drawings a few times, but they always made me uncomfortable.

“Yeah, but he never made any sense. He always babbled about words and stuff before he left.” It was true, Horans was a nut case, like Adae used to say. He’d seen something that made his brain go funky, and it made him stop in the middle of sentences and stuff like that. It was hard to talk to him, but he was funny, and interesting. Adae used to spend hours chatting with him before he left. Adae hardly ever had trouble talking with anyone, unless they upset him somehow.

“You didn’t listen, idiot.”

“I did listen!” I pouted. It wasn’t my fault that the old man talked in circles, like the patterns that the sun made on the ground. You could follow the paths, but they didn’t really go anywhere.

“No, you didn’t, or you’d know what I’m about to tell you. Anyways, the most interesting story Horans ever told us was about how the world actually works.”

“I thought we were talking about mama.”

“If you shut up for a minute, we’ll get there.” He glared at me for a moment before continuing. “Horans used to talk about words a lot, yeah. You know, there’s a story that the world is made up of words?”

“Huh?”

“Yeah, you heard me. All of this, the rocks, the trees, the light, you, me, all of this is made up of words, like the ones you and I are using. Except, different.”

“How are they different?”

“These words are written down somewhere. No one knows where. But, it’s like the symbols you can see on the sandstone just across town - you know, the ones I showed you once? Those are words, and you can read them. They make sounds just like the ones we’re saying, if you know how to look at them right.”

This was all really new to me. “But--”

“Hold on, let me finish. So all of this, the river, the houses, the grass, the ground, the clouds - all of this is stored in some book somewhere, right? Except in the form of words. So there are words to describe everything, and words to talk about what happens to those things. If you put all of those together, you get everything around us.”

“So, like when I was describing my favorite imaginary place to you, and it was something that didn’t actually exist except in those words?”

“Precisely. Now, here comes the cool part. All of these words - they can be changed. By writing words within the words, we can make things happen, make our own edits. So, if I wanted that rock to be a different colour, I could write it somewhere and the real words would change to match it. You got that?” Adae’s eyes reflected a bit of the sun, giving them the spark I loved, that meant he was excited about something.

“Sorta, I guess.”

“This is what mama does, Lark. Whenever people need something, she goes in and writes it; she changes the world to match their needs. This is called rayeda, like, the art of language. So, when she was at Remmens’s place today, what she did was she wrote ‘flame’ on his bundle of kindling, and it lit on fire, because that’s what she edited it to do. Pretty cool, right?” By this time, Adae had given up on being quiet; he was on his feet gesturing crazily. I was trying to follow along with that he was saying, but to be honest, I didn’t really get it for awhile. He was willing to explain it a few times, though. He was always good about that, explaining stuff over and over again until I got it. He didn’t want me to be afraid of anything because I didn’t get it. Well, really, he didn’t want anyone to be afraid of anything because they didn’t get it, but I was the only one who listened to him.

I pinched my face into a frown. “Who wrote our world, then? Words don’t just come out of nowhere, do they?”

Adae was taken by surprise. He froze, looking at me blankly. A couple seconds passed as I looked up at him. “Uh… what kind of a stupid question is that? I mean, someone wrote it. It doesn’t really matter who.”

I frowned and crossed my arms. “Sure it does, Adae. I mean, we’re editing their story. Don’tcha think they wouldn’t like that?”

Adae waved his arms and dismissed my questions. “Whatever. That’s not important. Anyways, we haven’t even gotten to the most interesting part, so shut up for a minute.” I humphed and sat quietly, waiting for him to continue. There was no getting him off track when he really wanted to talk about something.

“Right, well, mama can write the words correctly, but it takes a lot of practice. Bad stuff happens if you write them wrong.”

“Like what?” He was right, this was more interesting.

“It’s called-” Adae paused, adding a dramatic silence. I got annoyed at him and shoved him on the shoulder. He just smiled a little bit. “...Unraveling.”

Now I was really confused again. “Huh? Like cloth?”

“Yep. Look, anyone knows how to describe something. Like, for instance, this rock-” He held up a brown rock in his hand, about the size of his closed fist. It looked heavy. “I can talk about this rock. I can say it’s brown, it’s dirty, it’s heavy, it came from down the hill. That’s what’s already written. But let’s say I want to change it to be purple; I can just write purple on it with something, like this stick. What happens if I spell purple wrong?” I shrugged, looking up at him.

“That’s unraveling. I changed something about the world that can’t be changed back, and since a wrong spelling doesn’t have any meaning, all sorts of stuff goes wrong.” Adae’s face got darker, and he talked in a lower tone.

“Whaddya mean? What sorts of stuff?”

“I dunno, stuff. It stops working. Look, mama promised she’d show me one day, since that’s what she does. She goes around and fixes the unraveling. She told me she knows how to do it, so I’ll learn from her, and then we can try out here one day, alright? I’m gonna teach you.” He mussed my hair a little bit.

“Really? No kidding? You’ll teach me the words and rayeda and stuff?” I got really excited then, standing up and jumping a little bit.

“No kidding, but I gotta learn it first. We’re lucky, we both know how to read. Horans said everyone used to know how to read, y’know. He knew how to read. He said that people used to use rayeda for everything, but there weren’t enough of people like mama, so the unraveling got too bad and most people had to stop. That’s why there’s only one person per village who knows how to do it so well.” He sighed, sitting down again. He looked frustrated, and I didn’t know why.

“Don’tcha think that’s kind of silly, Lark? Mama doesn’t want to teach people. She says it’s too dangerous. But people are making all these mistakes because they don’t know how to do it properly, so if she’d teach them, she wouldn’t have to go fix everything all the time, and maybe then our village wouldn’t have so many problems all the time and people would be happier. People don’t even know how to read, really, Lark.” The patterns of the branches on the ground shifted, getting longer and stretching as the sun moved lower. I wondered what the words for the sun were, for it to work so well.

“I know how to read, Adae. You know how to read. Papa taught us when we were really, really little.”

“We’re unique, Lark - y’know, like we’re different than everybody else. It used to be that everyone all over the world was like that, used the sacred tomes to learn the characters and make their own words, but now people just learn the few they need. And they don’t even learn them well. It’s not right. We should all be able to have a say in what our world is like!” Adae threw the rock on the ground. “That’s why I’m gonna teach you. You’re gonna know all the basic words and more, be able to put them together like you saw in those books. We’re gonna change this, teach other people too, Lark. It can all go back to the way it should be.”

“Sure, Adae, we can do it!” I agreed without really knowing what I was agreeing to, but I knew it made Adae happy, so I did it anyways. I loved Adae when he got like this. There was that glint in his eyes, that crazy grin on his face, like nothing in the world could stop him when he wanted to do something. And nothing in the world probably could. Adae was unlimited.

We started spending a lot more time in the forest after that. There was lots of stuff for us to use, and we were all alone; nobody bothered to go out there but us, unless they needed something specific. We liked the darker part of the woods, though, where there weren’t so many berries and plants everywhere, and the more interesting plants lived - like the one with really sharp leaves that you could use to write on things, called Raven’s Sword. That’s what we generally used when we wanted to practice writing, since if you held the leaves just right they didn’t cut your hand and you could use them really carefully. Adae said that ‘accuracy is essential’; we risked cutting our hands so that when we wrote letters and words they wouldn’t be messy or unclear. Adae thought that was really important, because we didn’t want to bring on any unraveling just because of our silly mistakes.

Anyways, Raven’s Sword only grew in a few spots, so we usually followed it throughout the year, practicing wherever it was growing at the time. Practices started out really slow and boring. Adae went with mama on her trips, and she would teach him stuff, but he waited to teach me all of that until later; first we had to practice plain old writing. “I know how to read and write,” I used to complain to Adae, as he made me hold the sharp leaf and practice strokes in the air where I wouldn’t accidentally write anything.

“I know you do, but you need to be a master before you try doing it for real. You saw what happened to--” He choked off suddenly. “You know what happens when you mess something up. It’s not good. We’ve gotta be masters.”

I grimaced, feeling the weight in my arm from the effort of waving it in the air. I must have drawn the characters a, b, c, and d hundreds of times just that morning. “You’re already writing words with mama. It’s not fair.”

Adae looked at me and rolled his eyes. “Mama made me do the same thing, smart one. Look, you’ve just gotta do a little more. I’ll let you write a real word soon.” He was always so careful to keep us out of trouble. I sighed and scuffed my bare feet, wincing when I hit one of the sharper leaves and cut my toe.

“Alright, if you say so.” Even though my arm hurt a lot, I still raised it in the air and kept writing my letters and words, the fingers getting steadier with each time I did it. Adae grinned at me and I felt better.

Soon enough, after a few months of intense practice, Adae finally let me try a real word. It was a simple one, split, one of the first ones he had tried as well. It was cloudy that day, with the clouds an interesting shade of blue green reflecting up from the land. At least, that’s what Adae always told me, that light bounced off of things and carried their colours with it, and that’s how we saw stuff - our eyes got the colours that the light carried with it. I never quite believed him, since he teased me about stuff sometimes, but it seemed to make sense enough.

Anyways, we were out in the forest by the Raven’s Sword and it was really cold and I finally got to try out a word. Adae was very careful to demonstrate exactly how and where to write it, using a thick branch as an example surface. He pressed the point of the leaf into the bark, scratching an s, p, l, i, and t, then blowing on his handiwork. The letters were wobbly, but after a few seconds they glowed and the branch cracked in two down the middle. I squealed with delight, my hands flying to my face in shock.

“Adae, you did it! That branch is cracked in half! The letters turned gold, too!” I could still see a trace of them, where they were sunken into the wood.

He smiled, clearly proud of himself. “Yeah! Man, I still need practice, though. Maybe I should do more letter writing in the air like you.” I stuck my tongue out at him in response. “Anyways, now it’s your turn.” The sharp leaf in his hand was suddenly pressed into mine, and I gulped. “Look, there’s no need to be nervous. There’s nothing really dangerous around here that you could mess up if you don’t write split correctly. I’m here with ya, alright? Don’t be a scaredy cat.”

I swallowed and nodded, trying to hide the shaking in my hand. He grabbed me another branch, this one with four different pathways you could take, and set it down on the weeds in front of me. “Steady, now.” Leaning in, I placed the tip of the leaf on the branch, gulping as it wobbled on the uneven turf.

S

P

L

I

T

I imitated Adae and blew on it, sitting back and gulping as the letters began to glow. My arms felt like they weighed a hundred tons. Honestly, I was terrified at that moment, because I had seen what damage the unraveling could do. But Adae gave me a reassuring smile, and I felt better. The air was heavy, making me cough bit as I took a huge breath.

Crack. I watched as the branch split perfectly down the middle, the crack tracing a natural fault line in the wood. Before I could say anything, Adae grabbed me up into a huge hug and spun me around. I didn’t realize how much my hands were shaking. “You did it, Lark! I knew you could! Told you there was nothing to be afraid of!” His voice sounded like gold. It matched how I felt, the gold of the word I had written. I felt my face stretch into a big, stupid grin.

“Can I try again?” It was the best feeling, knowing that I changed something in the world. The only better one was seeing that Adae was proud of me. He laughed and nodded yes.

“But not just yet. It’s getting darker now, can’t you see the orange in the sky? The sun’s setting, we’d better get home.” He pushed up off of the ground. “C’mon, we’ll practice more tomorrow.”

I was puzzled, though. “Well, why don’t we just write something so that the sun is higher in the sky again?” Adae froze, and a shadow moved across his face as the sun continued to set. Suddenly, he grabbed me by the shoulders and pressed his face really close to mine. His hair tickled my eyes, and I squinted. The forest was quiet for a moment.

“Lark, think about how you felt just after you changed that branch. Didn’t you feel tired?” I nodded a bit, remembering how heavy my arms were and the shakiness of my hands. “That branch was okay to practice on, because it’s not going to be used many other places. It doesn’t affect a large part of the story, so it doesn’t take a lot of energy to change all the places it comes up.” He pushed me back suddenly, and pointed to the sky. “If you tried to change anything about the sun, the effort would kill you.”

My mouth fell open. “Kill me? Why?”

“Because think of all the people the sun is important to. If you moved it an hour back, say, think how many people’s lives would be changed. Think about all the animals and plants who use the sun. You would be editing so much, that’s more energy than one person can afford to give. We can only do little things, Lark. Promise me you won’t try anything big.” His voice was desperate, but I couldn’t see his face. I sniffled a bit at the harshness in his tone. He wasn’t any fun when he got like this and scolded me. But I promised I wouldn’t try anything big, anyways. He was scaring me a little bit with that talk about dying and all. I didn’t let it show, though.

“Is that what happened to-” I stopped talking, since Adae turned and gave me a look that could burn down the forest. He used to do that a lot, whenever he got sad. He made out like he was angry, but you could always tell that he was sad inside, since his shoulders were hunched over. I didn’t keep going, though, because I didn’t want Adae to be sad.

We kept practicing for weeks after that. It was so much fun. First we did a lot of cracking branches, but once that was easy, we also fixed the branches we broke. One time I attached three branches together to make a really long one, but that made me tired, so I didn’t get to play with it much. Adae thought it was cool, though, and used it to hang stuff, like plants he found. Eventually it turned into a little secret hideout, but we had to leave when the Raven’s Sword moved. We built it really well, though, so who knows, maybe it lasted. I hope it did. We had all sorts of different leaves hanging from it, making a sort of weaved fabric; sometimes, we’d practice our rayeda and actually attach them, and make new colours. I wanted to take the woven part home and show mama, but Adae said she’d know how we made it and we’d get in trouble and wouldn’t be able to practice anymore. That shut me up really quickly.

Eventually, we started learning a lot of different words, too. Like, if you wanted to fix something that was broken, you could use the word mend, but sometimes you could use the word heal, too, or attach, depending on what was broken.

“Part of practicing rayeda,” Adae said to me one burning afternoon, “is knowing when to use what word. That’s the key to being a wordsmith; you’ve gotta pick the words that say exactly what you mean.” Today, we were much closer to the edge of the forest than normal, because Adae had brought a chest of drawers with a crack in the side for us to heal.

“Adae, what’s a wordsmith?” I asked, curious. He’d used the word a few times, but I’d never known what it meant.

He looked over at me and grinned, plopping down and resting his back against the trunk of a tree. “I bet you can figure this one out if you try, Lark. Go on, give it a shot. I’ll help you if you need it.”

“Okay…” I mumbled, a little nervous about getting something wrong. His confidence was infectious, though. “Well, it’s got something to do with words, of course.” I glanced at Adae; he seemed amused, then smiled and gestured for me to continue. “A smith is… something like a blacksmith, right? Do they always work with metal?”

“Nope. Try again.”

“Uhm… well, maybe a smith just fixes and makes stuff?” I beamed, since I knew this was the correct answer. Adae interrupted me, though.

“Okay, you’ve got that. Now put it all together.” He looked impressed, and I sat up a little straighter.

“Well so, a wordsmith is a smith of words; they’re someone who builds words, who uses them, who puts them together and takes them apart and makes them better - like metal, right?”

“You’ve got the right idea.” The few colourful pebbles on the ground clacked in his hand as he picked them up. “You know how I said that everyone used to be able to practice rayeda?”

“Sure, yeah.”

“That’s kind of true, but there’s more to it. Here, let’s say these are words.” He lifted the pebbles in his hand, then set them down next to each other on the ground in front of us. He put them down gently, delicately, like they’d shatter if he threw them around or something. “Wordsmiths were the best of the best. While everyone could use things like split and mend, blaze and heal, they were limited to their own knowledge of words and experience. Wordsmiths went to a special school in a special library, the Library of Orya, far beyond the Elloen Chasms and crystal caverns - so far that no maps kept track of it - and there they were trained in the art of rayeda.”

“What’s a library?”

“It’s a great big palace where they store nothing but books. Actually, this library in particular is special; legends say that this library holds the history of the universe. All of the records, everything that has happened, is happening, and will happen, are held in this great library; where better to learn the art of editing than at the source itself? The works held there are what we change when we practice rayeda. Papa always said that there were millions - trillions - of books, all lining the walls, stacked higher than you can even see.”

“Why aren’t all books like that, then? We have books that tell stories that aren’t actually true, that didn’t actually happen. How can they exist?”

“Well, the universes in those books do exist; they just exist within the book. If you think about it, we can edit it, right? What’s different for us is that our text is held within our universe, rather than one level higher. That’s why rayeda is possible. By some faulty design, we ended up with control of our own fates, to a limited extent. But anyways, the wordsmiths were an elite force, distributed throughout the world once they’d gained their knowledge, and set on helping people and preserving the knowledge of language.” I could almost see the colours in his voice, how it rose and dipped like the faraway landscape he spoke of.

“Is mama a wordsmith? Are you?”

“No, definitely not.” He humphed, crossing his arms. “Mama isn’t trying to help people, she’s trying to stifle them, even if she doesn’t mean to. No, the wordsmiths always taught people; that was the price of the knowledge they gained. That’s why I’m going to become one. I’m gonna find that old library one day, and I’m gonna go in, and I’m gonna read every book they have and know everything there is to know about rayeda and words and stories, and I’ll restart the wordsmiths and redistribute the knowledge everywhere. Mama can’t stop me; people deserve to know.” The words were spoken with force and confidence, but they quivered in the air a little bit, like his lower lip when he was upset. He didn’t like not agreeing with mama, I could tell.

“I’ll come with you. We can be wordsmiths together!” His face got a little brighter and he pulled me into a hug.

“‘Course we will, short one. I wouldn’t think of leaving without ya.” He ruffled my hair and I play-shoved his shoulder. “Anyways, back to what I was saying about the wordsmiths. We know individual words; they used to be able to change the world using full sentences. The effort nearly killed them a lot of the time, because if they ever did anything wrong the unraveling would have gotten out of control. It was risky business, being a wordsmith, but they had the best jobs out of everyone. Now, let’s say these are the words: the, river, ran.” ‘The’ was the brown pebble, the red was ‘river’, and ‘ran’ was almost black. “How many different ways can I put these together?”

I thought about it, staring at the pebbles intensely. “One, I think.”

“Wrong. I can put them together in six different ways. What you’re thinking is of how many make sense.” He rolled the pebbles back around where to they began.

“Well, how many make sense?”

“More than you’d expect. ‘Ran, the river!’ ‘The ran river.’ ‘The river ran.’ Etcetera. Wordsmiths, when writing sentences, had to pick not only the right words for their ideas, but also the right order. But, when they wrote sentences, they were much more powerful.”

“Are we ever gonna write sentences, Adae?” My voice was quieter because of the pebbles in his hand. He looked at me deeply for a very long time.

“I don’t know, Adae. We’d probably need a teacher for that, and I don’t know if there are any wordsmiths left.” For some reason this made his eyes get a little teary. I wouldn’t have noticed if the sun hadn’t reflected it.

“What happened to them?”

“People get scared of things they don’t understand. All of those different word combinations, all of the beautiful sounds like armour and fragrance and celestial and decadence; people were jealous of the wordsmiths for having those. They didn’t know about the years of school and practice that went into the wordsmiths’ knowledge, and they were greedy so the decided that if they couldn’t have the words, no one could. Wordsmiths stopped being welcomed in towns, could no longer live off of people’s kindness and charity. It became a dead - or, dying - art.” As he told the story, Adae’s expression showed more emotions than I could keep track of.

“I wanna see the library with you, Adae.” And that was decided; someday, somehow, we were gonna visit that library, and Adae could finally get his wish. He smiled at me, looking touched by how much I meant it, and his eyes melted from their hardened state.

“Sure. Now, did I bring out this dresser for nothing? Come on, it’s about time we fixed it."