In the memory of the Great Dame’s Grimoire

The first thing the tome remembers is a greater number than one, at first and most proudly present was the hide in which it was bound, how it was cut conniving off the back of some great villain.

Secondarily, was the cord, the Linen thread that held it together being spun carefully by the loving hands of loveless people.

The stories the thread remembers were vastly different from the ones it’s signatures would one day carry, so unkindly bound in spinning that the thread itself was uncertain.

Which was not so kind a thing once it was finally penned.

You see, it’s a rare book that quite honestly finds its contents to be untrue. One that thinks with all it’s materials that what’s been written inside is of little value.

But still so kindly its lady scribe does say, “what great use you will be to my descendants. They will see what’s here and they will know all they need of hell and its waterways.”

These are meant as kind words, to offset the dissatisfaction of what was written in it, but the tome is still self-sorry for the ink that marred it’s pages. It wonders if all books could feel this way, ruin for its record, for the waste of it’s assembly.

But when it finds the way to ask it learned one answer, “no.”

Than another, “never.”

As it goes on, as a tome carried round the world by human beings, it learns from every book, codices, and parchment it asks even the most self-refuting that, “No written work thinks itself a liar.”

“At least not any good ones.”

And so it’s kept as such, a sorry tome of nonsense as every century after it’s completion passes it by. As it remains unread never really retold, but still it persisted.

In the corrupt factions of monasteries, heretical and unkind, and though it’s pages refused to rot, and it’s ink refused such expected things as fading, it remained unused. Unread. Nullified by the disinterest of human beings.

To the point it understood that those horrible truths remained.

It was not a good book.

No matter the spinster’s with their spinner pricket linen.

No matter every creature used in the tanning of it’s hide.

No matter the kind last words and hands of the scribe that ruined it.

But then it is opened.

By a nun in training, dissuaded by most to contend with its contents. It was heretical. It was unnecessary. It was better burned than red.

But still she does, and with a kindness not unlike the tanner’s hound she says, “what horrible things. What great and horrible things.”

And one day when her father binds her to a good match, the tome goes with her. It was after all a waste in that great big nunnery.

But it had been read. And loved. And for a time it’s enough, that its pages had been touched.

Though one day it would be forgotten, the tome is happy in it’s use.

That should be enough.

Time is lost, and by then the reader too, but it’s found again, in a library of the untouched. And in a world alight by chaos, it is stolen, and read aloud finally, in faith of better days.

“And so I was pulled into hell by a great black hound, eyes blazing copper-blood, into the water and past the roots of the great oak.” She says comparing that to the most awful of betrayers.

“Taken to the hunter I was beaten, until the coins in the hollow of my stomach came up. The price of transport for my body and soul, those the price for my kidnappers good harvest.” A needless pain she continues, “a cruelty oh so expected of evil men. Like the ones who want us dead.”

“I hear the threat, ‘I’ll eat you in the coming days, though what other use I find I’ll take.’ And the mother continues, don’t make believe that ‘purity’ applies to us.”

They will hurt you.

“I wait it out, until the hound does turn on his master at the behest of a heartless woman.’ Isn’t she like Artemis, saving a girl who would be devoured?” The mother says.

It listens finally to words it had only known mouthed not said by any who’d bother, and the feeling is new, a reprieve from the nothing it had known. And it does carry on, hand to careful hand, in the libraries of one family.

One lineage.

Calling blood, that of the scribe. As was meant.

Daughter to daughter, from nations ended, in homes warm and cozy, always in the hands of someone dearly with it’s unfading pages. And it is finally in one place long enough to learn the names of its readers.

Of the girls that flipped it’s pages, little Gillian who accepts but is wary, and little Lindsay who is enraptured.

And while it is certain that not a single word inside is true, that fascination is enough to keep it. To carry it. To read it again to her daughters.

And to disappear all too soon after, and for the next three years be lost unread in the same cottage it had left.

It knows what time is finally. Real enough, and finally well read, aware of itself unlike it had ever been before.

What is it when such a short time becomes lonely to a thing that once thought it should be burned?

Something heretical to its nature, how could words on a page be a lie?

And then she opens it, Gillian again, older, more worn, a widow grieving again her sister who left, with it and died.

Only for it to be carried back, a heavy weight, a baby in one arm, the tome reliquary in the other. And finally it is opened again, Gillian reading to that baby, “But I was sloppy, and I could only find the snow kings heart. But then I was clever, in the fight with the enraged and heartless female spirit I finally pushed it in. The heart of the king into this heartless creature. Like a spear into her body, the hotblooded woman went cold. Until she rose smiling, and asked, ‘what is it you dread to lose? I can lead you from this place.”

“And so I was, hand in hand with a virtue-less fiend. To a bucket on a rope suspended from the sky. And finally, to leave a sweet tooth as payment. I rose as naked as the day I’d been born to my father from a Well he’d dug.”

“And I write to you, a human being in need of a path out of hell. Know you are lost, pay dearly, and hide. If you are loved you can find a way.”

Finally the words in it were not simply honest, but true. The scribe’s kindness proven, the spinster’s work never wasted, for it finally knew itself.