InkDrinkers - endlessm/threadbare GitHub Wiki

See also: Null · The Fray · The Void · The Ink Well · InkKeepers · Inklings · MemoryMoths

"Ye'll hear them afore ye see them. Sounds like a pen scratchin' wi' nothin' left in it."

  • Fergus FenPole - Punter of the Deep Channels

Classification: Child of Null, one of The Fray. Primary range: the edges of the Fraying, the Ink Well, and anywhere something has been written. Diet: ink, and everything living in it.

Overview

InkDrinkers are spindly, mosquito-like creatures that swarm in from the edges of the Fraying in long, whining clouds. Drawn to anything written or printed, they alight on open pages and sink their needled mouths into the ink, draining sentences from the inside out. A library of theirs is a library of blank pages - unsigned letters, hollow songbooks, ledgers full of polite silences. Where the InkDrinkers feed, the Imagination of a place withers, and those who keep them at bay learn quickly to carry sealed bottles, fresh quills, and stories worth shouting aloud.

Children of Null

The old records of the Observatory of the Unseen called InkDrinkers Void-feeders, and for a long time Threadlings believed they were born of the Void itself. They are not. Nothing comes out of the Void: it makes nothing, and anything that passes into it is unravelled forever.

InkDrinkers are among the Children of Null. On the Not Loom, hidden in the BlotWorks deep in the Ink Well, Null weaves them from the last loose fibres that drift at the edge of the Fraying, using If's Spindle, torn from the Eternal Loom. Each InkDrinker is spun to a hunger for writing, and like all the Fray will take any of the three gifts, but it favours Imagination above all. Null wove an enemy for each of the gifts the FirstSpun gave the world, and InkDrinkers are the enemy of If's gift, Imagination. They drink the ink, and the Inklings living in it, so that no new idea can ever reach the page. They are Null's first denial, Not, given a needle: nothing new. The Void is drawn to absence, and a place that has stopped imagining anything new is the easiest place in Threadbare for it to take. Null sets them loose along the Fraying, and the swarms find their own way inward from there.

Appearance

An InkDrinker is no ordinary insect. Most are the size of a songbird, and the oldest and hungriest grow as long as a Threadling's forearm. Their bodies are long and jointed, grey as Void Creep, with glassy, rattling wings and legs that dangle beneath them like loose threads. At the front of the head is the needle: a long, hollow mouth, sharp as a nib, that it drives into the page to drink.

A hungry InkDrinker is lean and pale. Once it has fed, it changes. Its body swells until it hangs heavy and glistening, and it takes on the colour of whatever it last drank: blue-black from the Well, red from a KnitWitch dye-house, gold from a Library binding, rose from a Linenville ledger. No two swarms look quite alike, and a swarm that has fed in many places crosses the dusk sky like a scatter of coloured beads.

Then there is the sound. Every InkDrinker whines, high and thin and constant, and those who know them say it is exactly the sound of a pen scratching across a page with no ink left in it. A whole swarm, heard across open water, is enough to set an InkKeeper's teeth on edge.

How They Feed

InkDrinkers do not tear pages or chew bindings. They leave the page itself perfectly whole. What they take is what was written on it.

They drink from the most recent words backwards, which is why a letter so often loses its signature first, and a record loses its latest entries before its oldest. A songbook keeps its notes but loses its words, so it can still be played but never sung. A ledger keeps its columns but loses its figures. What remains looks tidy, polite, and completely empty.

Not even the oldest writing is safe. At the Ink Well, InkDrinkers drink the ink from the stitch-script of the ReedKin's standing stones, leaving the notches pale. The carved notches themselves hold on far longer than any page, but without their ink, and with so few left who can read them, they are harder than ever to understand.

With the ink go the Inklings that lived in it. Whether they are destroyed, carried off into the Void, or lost somewhere in between, no one in Frays End knows. The truth is worse and better: the InkDrinkers carry them back to Null's BlotWorks, deep in the Ink Well, where they are locked away in vats (see The Denial Looms). What is certain is that a drained page is cold to the touch, and nothing written on it again ever feels quite as alive.

The Squirt

InkDrinkers guard what they feed on. When anyone comes near a swarm at its meal, the InkDrinkers turn and squirt the ink they have stolen, in big, wobbling blobs from the tip of the needle. Each blob is the colour of the ink that went into it, and a swarm that has fed widely will fill the air with blobs of every colour.

But the ink that comes out is not the ink that went in. The Inklings are gone from it, and so are the words. InkKeepers call it hollow ink: all the colour of a story, and none of the story. It cannot be written with, and it will not wash out. Wherever a blob lands it leaves a bright splatter, and a splatter across an open book turns every line it touches into a smear no one can read.

A blob can be dodged, but a swarm has far more blobs than anyone has room to dodge. That is why those who know the Ink Well never go near a feeding swarm if they can help it, and why every open page is covered long before dusk.

"Never leave yer book open, pet. Not at dusk, not ever."

  • Elspeth EbonDrop - Keepmistress of the Ferry Keep

Why Imagination Withers

It might seem that creatures which feed on writing would starve a place of its Memory. The Elders say the harm goes somewhere else first.

Ink is where the Inklings live, and Inklings are the oldest bargain in Threadbare: they feed on ideas, and in return they help ideas come. When the InkDrinkers drink the ink, they drink the Inklings with it. A writer sits down at a drained desk and nothing comes. A story half-imagined never reaches the page, and so it never reaches a reader, and never sparks the next idea in someone else. A place can remember everything it ever wrote, and still stop imagining anything new. Where that happens, the Void is never far behind.

Swarms and Seasons

InkDrinkers are drawn to open ink, still air, and quiet. They rise thickest at dusk, when the air settles and the light goes grey, which is why the InkKeepers cork every spring and seal every bottle before dark in the Evening Stopper. They swarm hardest where writing has been left unread and unattended, and they avoid moving air, strong smoke, and noise.

Each season they come a little further from the Fraying, and a little deeper into The Ink Well.

Kinds of InkDrinker

Three kinds of InkDrinker are known, and all three are woven on the Not Loom in The BlotWorks.

Kind Size What it does How the StoryWeaver deals with it
Splugs Songbird-sized The regular InkDrinkers. They spit ink from their trunks Dodge the spit, and wash away what lands with water
Sploads Large and bloated Slow, heavy and full to bursting. They explode when they get near the StoryWeaver, shaking the ground and throwing off the StoryWeaver's aim Keep your distance, or lure them into exploding somewhere harmless
Splats Small Fast, darting InkDrinkers that fly straight at the StoryWeaver and burst in a splat of ink, briefly blotting out part of the view Dodge them; the splat soon fades

Splugs

The InkDrinkers most Threadlings know, and the ones already flying in the game: spindly, whining and always thirsty. A Splug drains ink with its trunk and spits it back out, in bright blots of hollow ink that blot out writing and splash across the ground.

Sploads

A Spload is an InkDrinker that has drunk far too much. It hangs heavy and swollen in the air, drifting slowly towards anything with ink in it. When it gets near the StoryWeaver, it explodes in a great burst of ink, shaking the ground and throwing off the StoryWeaver's aim. Gameplay: screen shake, and a brief wobble to the StoryWeaver's aim.

Splats

Small, fast InkDrinkers that dart straight at the StoryWeaver and burst on impact. A Splat leaves a splat of ink right across the traveller's eyes, partly blotting out their view until it fades. Gameplay: a Splat flies into the screen, and an ink splat briefly covers part of the player's view.

The BlotQueen

Main article: The BlotWorks

The BlotQueen is the largest InkDrinker ever woven, and the guardian of the Not Loom: a huge, bloated InkDrinker, heavy with everything the rig has drained, coiled around the InkWheel at the summit of the Blotted Spire. She has not one trunk but many, and every one of them spits ink. She can fire single drops of ink at the StoryWeaver, or fire and hold whole lines of ink right across the chamber. Wherever her ink lands it stays, in sticky puddles that slow the StoryWeaver to a crawl, so the summit grows harder to cross the longer the fight goes on. The StoryWeaver's grapple is their best friend here: swinging over the puddles and out of the path of her lines keeps them moving.

She cannot be beaten by force, only diluted. Bottle by bottle, the StoryWeaver thins her, and as she thins the ink in her chamber drops and the fight changes around her: she moves from the pool to the feed channels to the nib slit, changing her tactics each time, and calling in Splugs, Sploads, Splats and Smudgers as she goes. When at last she runs clear, all the stolen ink pours out of her and back into the swamp, the coloured springs at the swamp's edge run again, and she shrinks to an ordinary InkDrinker and whines away into the mist. The InkWheel slows and stops.

Keeping Them Away

An InkDrinker can be driven off, but a swarm is always bigger than it looks, and there are always more behind it. So those who keep them at bay rely on three things:

  • Sealed bottles. Ink that is corked cannot be drunk. Neither can a page kept closed, covered, or wrapped in veil-cloth.
  • Fresh quills. What is drained can be written again. Copying a fading page onto new cloth gives its words new ink and new Inklings to carry them.
  • Stories worth shouting aloud. A spoken story has no ink to drink. A room full of people telling stories is the one place an InkDrinker will never settle.

The InkKeepers of the Ink Well have turned this into a whole way of life, with WardWort, maple-smoke lanterns, reed-chimes, stoppered springs, and Keeps so loud with stories that the swarms never come near.

"They're not clever, and they're not cruel. They're only hungry. That's what makes them so hard to stop."

  • Ossian OakGall - InkKeeper of the Lower Keep

InkDrinkers and MemoryMoths

InkDrinkers are often confused with MemoryMoths, and the two are sometimes seen in the same places. The old records of The Observatory of the Unseen were careful to tell them apart:

MemoryMoths InkDrinkers
They take Memory itself, and what it means The written record: ink on the page
What withers first Memory Imagination
Nature Two natures: custodians in the Mines, a plague in swarms One nature only: hunger
What they leave Fragments of stories carried on their wings Blank pages, and bright splatters of hollow ink
Kept away by Light, the ring of a bell, and remembering aloud Sealed ink, fresh copies, and stories told aloud

A MemoryMoth carries what it takes. An InkDrinker empties, and spoils what it cannot empty.

Narrative Function

InkDrinkers are a challenge met by protecting and restoring: sealing ink before dusk, keeping well clear of a roused swarm, copying fading pages, and filling quiet places with stories.

In the Threadbare Plot, InkDrinker swarms have overrun the Port of Possibility on The Imagine Isles, cutting the Isles off from the mainland, and the StoryWeaver must clear a ship of them in Port in a Storm before following the trail to The BlotWorks.

For contributors, InkDrinkers show one of Threadbare's quieter truths: that stories are kept alive by being used, shared, and passed on, and that anything left unread and unattended is the easiest thing for the Void to take.

Connections

  • Null - who weaves them on the Not Loom
  • The Fray - the Children of Null, of whom they are one
  • The Void - whose work they were woven to hasten
  • The Ink Well - their richest feeding ground
  • InkKeepers - who keep them at bay without fighting
  • Inklings - drained from the page along with the ink
  • ReedKin - whose inked stitch-script the InkDrinkers drain
  • MemoryMoths - often confused with them, but different
  • If - the FirstSpun of Imagination, whose gift they were woven to starve

← The World of Threadbare | Creature

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