Letters Too Tall to Read

Come stand under the stems with me, $N, and look straight up while I tell it. This leaf was once the alphabet itself, or the part of it that reaches: the ascenders, the strokes that climb above the other letters, the tall backs of b and d and h that let a reader tell them apart from a glance. The Binders kept the letters but cut the reaching away, because a page is neater when every line sits the same modest height, and modest pages bind faster. The strokes did not accept being cut down. They grew instead, taller each year the Book stayed shut, until they became these stems, and the little bowls the letters used to curl their ink into became the crowns where the roostwings nest. The stars wheel oddly overhead because the sky itself is trying to read letters this tall and cannot find where the sentence ends. The Glossator climbed the tallest stem at the Star Root and left their mark where the letters stop reaching and the bare sky begins, and told me, before they climbed back down, that even the tallest ascender in the world had found no ceiling to write against.

Experience

9700

Currency reward

34s 50c

Repeatable

No

Sigil

Ledger and ink