The Letter That Never Set

Sit again, $N, and I will tell you what Backcast actually is. Before the Book was bound, one page was set entirely in type, letter by letter, the ordinary way every page is made. But the compositor kept unsetting it, pulling letters back out of the line to try another word, another order, never satisfied that any arrangement said what the page meant to say. By the time the Binders received the forme, no two letters were still locked together; it was a case of loose type with no line left to read. They would not print a page that had come apart in the setting, so they let it go rather than lock it for the compositor, and the Ink Tide carried it here, spilled across the shallows like dropped metal type, block by block, each one still carved with its own backwards letter, waiting to be set. The prowlers and gnawers you have been putting down are the compositor's own abandoned attempts, $N, still circling the case looking for the order that was never found. The Glossator read the scatter more carefully than anyone and left their own set type at the Last Sort before they went looking for the line it was always meant to complete.

Experience

21000

Currency reward

1g 62s 0c

Repeatable

No

Sigil

Ledger and ink