Quest

A Manuscript of Returns

FOLIO · I · RECTO

FOLIO · I · VERSO

Prologue

Here begins the chronicle of the second journey, undertaken not because the first was unfinished, but because the destination, in our absence, has changed.

You stood once at the threshold of an unfamiliar wood, with the certainty of a single road and the courage of one who has never truly lost his way. That road, we are told, was straight. The landscape it crossed was rendered in fixed colour: the ochre of harvest, the cobalt of high noon, the ash of evening. The map, when you needed it, agreed with the world.

This second quest is not so. Returning, the traveller finds the same wood under a different sky. The map, which has not been redrawn, no longer corresponds — or perhaps the world is now the one that drifts. Trees you remember as oaks bend now into willow shapes. The river runs uphill. A door stands open in a place where, last time, there was no wall.

† The cartographers of the first age called this the dreaming of stones. They knew the world refuses to remain in its earlier shape once a witness has departed it.

Read on, then, and walk slowly. The codex you are turning is not strictly a record. It is also a place. As you scroll, the pages will fan, layer, and spiral — and somewhere within their gilded margins, you will recognise that the second attempt was the only true one.

— Incipit Liber Secundus —

I

Caput I

Of the Return

A

traveller who turns back to the road he has already walked discovers, soon enough, that the road is no longer his. The ferns, once trampled, have stood again. The stream, last drained by his thirst, is now a deeper colour. The faces he half-recognises in the village square are sons of the men he knew, and they look at him as one would at any stranger arriving from the wrong direction.

So it is with the second quest. It begins, always, in a familiar place — and is undertaken in the conviction that this familiarity will hold. It will not. Even the threshold — the doorframe, the ford, the crossroads — has weathered.

Of the changed Wood

Note the willow where the oak once stood, and do not be alarmed. The wood has not betrayed its remembrance of you; rather, it has continued, in your long absence, to do the slow work of being a wood. The sapling sprung from the acorn you stepped over. The fox kit grew, hunted, and was buried under the same hawthorn whose berries you once stained your hand with.

The same river twice cannot be entered — the second time, by the same traveller; the third time, by the same river.
— from the marginal gloss

Walk gently, then. Take your bearings not from the map but from the sound of the wind in branches whose names you can no longer remember. The wind, at least, has kept its old appointment with the leaves.

† A bestiary fragment notes that the hare in the margin will leap once when the chapter is read aloud, and rest again when the reader's attention strays.

FOLIO · II · VERSO

II

Caput II

The Labyrinth

— here the wall folds, and the page that was on the left becomes the page on the right —

FOLIO · III · AMBO

III

Caput III

F

The Crown

inis. The pages, having fanned and folded, align now at last along their proper hinge. Two leaves are restored to a single spread. The reader looks down at the open codex and sees, in place of two facing pages, one continuous illumination — a quest that was always one road, walked a second time so that we might at last see it whole.

What was begun in the wood, lost in the labyrinth, and recovered at the spiral's still centre is given here its final form. Not a moral, but an emblem; not an ending, but a closing flourish in the scribe's hand.

❦ ❦ ❦

Go now, traveller. Take a third quest if you must — the codex will write itself again to receive you. We have only ever been pages: turning, fanning, settling at last into a stack with a faint glow at its gilded edge.

— Explicit Liber Secundus —

FOLIO · IV · FINIS

❦