The Flourish Around the Letter

This leaf never carried a word of the story, $N: it was a vignette, the little painted flourish a scribe draws around a chapter's first letter to say a new chapter has begun. An editor decided the Book had grown too plain for such decoration and cut every vignette leaf in one pass, this one included. It did not burn: a flourish is built to please the eye first, and pleasing things resist an ending. It grew roots, then terraces, then a whole hill of terraces, still curling round nothing in particular the way it always did around that first letter. Someone else walked every stair reading the carving as if it still spelled a word, and left their own flourish at Thornwatch, at the edge of the hedges: go and read what they added to it.

Experience

5850

Currency reward

30s 0c

Repeatable

No

Sigil

Ledger and ink