The signing of the United States Declaration of Independence… has gone awry!  As it so happens the declaration was too powerfully worded, and effectively declared independence from the realm of Earth.  The signing founders, and those legally considered their property, and a Native American tribe roped in as well thanks to an old treaty, have been transported to a strange new land where trees write upon their own leaves and owl-eyed worms march about in the shapes of men.

Twenty years on the Founders are desperate to return to the war they never started, and have enlisted their mixed-heritage children as an army to help them fight the Bickyplots: thirteen shambling horrors with colonial inspirations of their own.  Here the written word is magic, and a new declaration might undo everything, but what of the children who have fought and journaled so hard to build their own lives?  Find out in this, the first of the Declaration duology.

(estimated reading time: 1 hour, 16 minutes)

(estimated reading time for entire novel: 6 hours)

Declaration

Pilgrim’s Anchor

by

Blaine Arcade

From the Unintended Declaration of Independence from the Earth

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

From the Pilgrim’s Anchor Charter

Just as man has found himself on foreign shores and learned of their alien men, so too can he be faced with aliened and remote concepts. Every mind can thus be unfurled and read as a map, however daunting traversal may threaten itself to be through unfamiliar rivers and mountain ranges.

So it is that we find ourselves exploring a new mind, and in so doing disturbing its daily thought, bringing to it nightmares in dream and daylight alike. In order to found a tranquil mutual existence where respect bridges the gap of continental minds we must explore, and disturb, and trespass. All is so done in the earnest hope that peoples differing can be made to understand each other.

Here it is declared, and taken as fated and patient understanding, that any strife thus caused cannot be held in accounts vengeful, brought as a grievance of compounded cultural interest only to those who have adjusted to the course of history. —That where a pilgrim has dropped anchor is not where he has dealt injury, and that a world discovered is a world claimed, and that all living things are entitled to learn, disturb, and sow as they test the boundaries of freedom.

John Hancock   Josiah Bartlett   William Whipple   Samuel Adams   John Adams   Robert Treat Paine   Stephen Hopkins   William Ellery   Roger Sherman   Samuel Huntington   William Floyd   Philip Livingston   Francis Lewis   Richard Stockton   John Witherspoon  Francis Hopkinson   John Hart   Abraham Clark   Benjamin Franklin   John Morton   James Wilson   Caesar Rodney   William Paca   Thomas Stone   Thomas Jefferson   Benjamin Harrison   Thomas Nelson Jr.   Francis Lightfoot Lee  Carter Braxton   Joseph Hewes  John Penn   Edward Rutledge   Thomas Heyward Jr.   Thomas Lynch Jr.   Arthur Middleton  Button Gwinnett   Lyman Hall   George Walton

The Writing on My Walls

They pester and squawk, complain to me

but I can’t hear their frowns

so I chase them up my knee

and drink their sorrows down

Welcome to my downest town

say your piece, ‘fore you drown

They bite their fingers to bony nibs

and suck to draw the blood

last chance to tell no fibs

‘fore stomach juices flood

Panicked scrawl on my intesti-stall

scratch-tickles out a laugh

That’s gibb’rish writ upon my walls,

so no instruction to the staff!

-Xylofont Phanny-upon-Twone, Bickyplot drinking song

Ledger of Harvest from Wild Opera Worm

No official name was yet given to the soil underfoot. The Lenape called it Wormland, and it did belong to the worms, or the worm-like, at least enough to allow them swift travel deep under its surface. Those above had to be quick, but still quiet, for an opera worm knew the difference between a footfall and a raindrop by character of sound alone.

The Lenape were no strangers to stalking prey through forests, but not these forests, so it was mostly left to the young, who had developed their own techniques. From across the gap in tactics it looked too fast and inattentive, rows of people rushing along like flagging goslings, incapable of spotting any animal sign along the way.

No one was present to judge them, except for the veteran master of the hunt there to keep the young hunters out of trouble, one Edward Rutledge. Of the Founders rather than the Lenape, he did not call the muck clinging to his boots Wormland. To him it was Evidentia, the land they had to build a case against, as if in court, down to the requirement that every fact be signed, delivered, and kept on the record.

There was still another name, chosen by the Founders’ black slaves in the dwindling days of their official servitude those twenty-two years ago. Pursuitia. Rutledge didn’t know what the young called it in private, only that they placated him with Evidentia aloud, but each time they did a needle pinned the word in the air, and they all felt it. What was said in Wormland, Evidentia, and Pursuitia was not what was truest. It was what was written.

Rutledge hadn’t gotten his way, thanks to being the youngest Founder when the anchor was dropped out of necessity and their marooned republic founded. His way would’ve kept all those without full white blood from literacy, denying much of the next generation the ability to give their new home a secret name.

Now they could stray. Now Mr. Rutledge had to keep the closest eye on them as they tried to do the same to the opera worms they tracked under the ground. Presumably. He couldn’t hear them or see the signs. Hunting was one of the many chores and duties given the young, as the Founders had to keep their concern to the drafting of law and policy, lest a foul wind out of Bickering Hall blow their notices from their boards and rewrite their very existence.

A hand went up, stopping the party of eight young hunters all at once, with the sluggish Founder following a second later. A roll of his eyes shrugged off what he knew was coming. Better his roll than those of the opera worm, big as they were; someone might wind up glued to their surface and dragged underground. The raised hand turned into a pointing finger. There it was. Rutledge had to make himself scarce, hide behind a tree, for the young insisted the worms would spot him immediately.

Begrudgingly he obeyed, picking a tree just thick enough to obscure, careful not to rest his head upon its bark. The intervening decades, a pair of sour cherries indeed, had not made him accustomed to the alien qualities of Evidentia’s flora and fauna. Its leaves were papery as opposed to waxy, decorated with curling flourishes rather than branching veins. Sometimes they caught fire, seemingly unprompted, and those were the most valuable ones! A curmudgeon’s posture protected him from the pale-black bark, the color of mushroom gills, and its unpleasant texture: sponge cut into wafers and stacked.

Agitated as he was, it wasn’t the tree or the dismissive hand gesture that was the worst of it. No, it was the owner of the hand. Blueberry Kidd. Most of the new generation had the respect to use their given Christian names, at least when under command of a Founder, and keep any Lenape names in those waistcoat journals of theirs, but not Blueberry.

Perhaps it was because she couldn’t write it down, he thought, amusing himself. From what he gathered she had the penmanship of a chick that had knocked over the inkwell and scurried across the page. So she had to say it, and embarrass herself every time, always introduced as a flaw in their company, like a hairy mole or a scar earned through incompetence.

Beneath her haughty hand, wrapped about her raised forearm, was the primary accessory to her foolishness: the spotted gray tail of a dog, grown twice as long as nature intended by its Evidentia life. Nor did nature intend for it to be animate separate from the rest of the animal, somehow able to sense and react to its surroundings in the absence of eyes, ears, nose, and mouth, but the featureless addendum to the dog did just that, and this one did it always in the company, practically the employ, of Blueberry Kidd.

She would be even freer with its name than she was with her own, and she called it Wagner, which Rutledge was sure was another of her veiled insults to the people who raised her. It got a Christian name when she wouldn’t dare touch one herself.

What the Founder didn’t bother to notice was the broader end of Wagner, its face if it had one, leaned this way and that, following their invisible prey as they approached the surface. In just a few moments the hunters would spring their snare, collect the bounty, and be back in Pilgrim’s Anchor before Pursuitia’s amber twilight gave way to its ocean-blue night, only black during solstice and equinox.

Her peers sensed it just as well as she did, and all of them silently crouched like frogs, weight balanced on tented fingers, probing for the wake of opera worms. Three. Three worms. A very small pod, perhaps hermaphrodite parent and twin children. In such a dynamic the twins competed to be more like their forebear, with the best mimic sometimes bullying the other sibling out of parental care entirely.

No breach yet, Blueberry glanced back at Rutledge’s selected tree to make sure he wasn’t peeking. For once he kept properly out of the sight line and she didn’t have to overlook his obvious contempt. So much easier it was, to look lovingly upon the lump of fur, a touch longer and fluffier than what surrounded, that was Wagner’s face than to consider Rutledge’s bulbous yet under-baked cheekbones, wispy hair atop craggy forehead poking out under powdered white wig, flat mouth like the underside of a gasping ray, and condescending eyes always ready to watch her fall all the way down, even if it was a mundane trip over a root.

A new face distracted her, appearing first as a gray-green lump rising out of the ground between her and the Founder’s tree. Growing to an almost absurd degree, the mound became the opera worm’s entire head, bigger and heavier than the girl of twenty-two that had stalked it, the circumference of its pupils more than Wagner could completely encircle.

The head wasn’t much more than eyes, like opera glasses enclosed in smooth clammy flash, hence the moniker, beneath them a tiny frowning mouth and the worm body holding it aloft, hoisting it to Blueberry’s height. The porous golden canyons of its irises were quite a trek for a gaze to cross, but once it did the bluish umbra of the pupil reflected what it saw with great clarity, often seeming to slightly magnify faces, and the expressions upon them more so. She guessed this was one of the children, as there was something spry in the twin mirrors framing her indigo reflection:

Her eyes were almost big enough to take in the wonders of Pursuitia, shocking in their contrast between white and dark. Lustrous black hair rained down both shoulders, more likely to swallow her pillow in the morning than be ruffled into misbehavior. Thin lips stitched together her drawn cheeks, gaunt bone structure obscured by the anthill browns of her skin.

And all of it completely invisible to the juvenile opera worm in that moment. It, nor the two others which rose amidst the hunters, couldn’t see any of the humans. Rutledge would’ve stuck out like an arrow wound; that was why any Founder accompanying them always had to hide himself behind a tree to keep from startling the worms.

Countless times they tried to explain it to the musty old men, but it never stuck in their minds, accustomed as they were to easily riding out into Earthly woods and coming back with trophies they could mount over a fireplace.

The animals of Pursuitia were different, and not just in form. With those giant eyes, which served other purposes more than sight, they perceived only intent. When a bug scurried along they saw a speck of hunger, and when corralled by the natives they saw only waddling mounds of nurturing.

Rutledge was a lighthouse of hostility. On his signal pyre burned frustration, impatience, anger, disrespect, and boredom. Everything which compelled each step forward warned the opera worms of the threat he represented; if he so much as sneezed the top of his nose past the edge of the tree they would descend back into the ground and dive too deep to track.

Resting stoically on the other hand were the hunters, breathing as the breeze. Minds cleared. Souls cooled. Heartbeat rhythm open to new time signatures. At that moment they truly didn’t want to wrangle the opera worms and sever their tail sections for meat, leather, adhesives, and solvents. They intended only to exist.

Which was all that could be said for the rocks and the meandering mists, things that opera worms also did not see. Blueberry knew it was all part of a natural web, and that every element and creature had grown well together, almost respectful even as they fed on their neighbors.

Pursuitia’s trees developed false intent so they could act in their own defense and heat themselves in the winter, incidentally making them excellent stock for drafting paper and their sap an equally ideal ink. The opera worms, wishing to feast on their leaves, developed intent-sight to target them.

The only things disturbing this harmony were Pilgrim’s Anchor and Bickering Hall, and she might have felt shame from being spawned of the former, but that could have quickly festered into dark intent, so she kept her mind passive.

Trial and error had taught them their elders couldn’t hide behind rocks or hills. Their intent could be seen as if the obstructions weren’t there. Only the trees, with their false intent acting like a room screen, kept them hidden.

To go about their feeding, the three giant worms extended out of the ground only far enough to reach the lower canopy, where they proceeded to roll their giant eyes against the trunks as if ensuring deep detail on a wax seal, thus compressing the leaves and pulling them off. Once their eyes, perpetually lubricated by sticky tears, were fully coated in leaves, long thin tongues spooled out of their mouths and snaked across their surface, looping around and pulling in the food.

All three were high enough to look like trees themselves when the hunters rose silently to their feet and pulled their weapons from their backs. Timid and harmless except for the occasional frightened thrash, hunting the worms did not require a Franklin kite, but muskets and hatchets had long been useful without enhancement by the electric fluid.

For now the guns, with their spade-shaped bayonets, were simply spears, and would only be cutting along predetermined lines. Killing an opera worm was a terrible waste, given that its body segments separated under threat, allowing the creature to retreat and regenerate them, effectively making each one a renewable resource.

A terrible waste… but nonetheless one the Bickyplots were most guilty of. And occasionally the Founders, Kidd reminded herself, still more watchful of Rutledge’s tree than the undulating column of worm flesh in front of her. Perhaps she shouldn’t have come. Her mere presence always made Founders so agitated, and thus more likely to assert themselves in a way that might get a worm killed.

The young knew the worms’ population was dwindling in the area, but the Founders didn’t listen. Or they did, and didn’t think it mattered. They would all be leaving soon anyway, they assured, back to the land of the free.

Kidd had little choice though. If she couldn’t hunt and forage there was little else she could do thanks to her clumsy reading and writing. To her it always felt like the letters betrayed her, not her eyes, leapfrogging over each other as they did. It was tempting to reason that she was just sensitive to tree-intent, still visible in paper and ink made from them, but no, it occurred with other substances as well.

It took her five times as long to read something as it did her friends, and she was always days behind in journal exchanges. So it was no wonder she fared better in the wilderness, scouting for Bickyplots and Silhouettes, wrangling anatimals, and chewing at the edge of their maps to reveal new details.

While she blew away these idle thoughts to stay cloaked, the others surrounded the tallest worm of most robust girth, assuming it to be the parent and the one with the most segments to offer. Their bayonets honed in on a seam five segments back from the head, which would leave the opera worm enough body to properly burrow and escape.

But it couldn’t be allowed to escape immediately. Some time ago they’d started tagging random worms with ledgers in order to do some environmental spying. For it to be of any use they had to check every worm captured for a ledger to see if and how the documents had updated themselves. In Pursuitia, the written word ruled, and it did so as magic despite the best efforts of Mr. Franklin.

Weaving back into focus, Blueberry put herself in position to assist in the capture, stepping underneath the shadow of its bulbous head. Four would strike at the segment to cause the split, three would hack at the lower body with hatchets to anchor it and keep it from retracting too far into the soft soil, and Miss Kidd would put herself in front of its eyes once the head fell, blinding it with her bright intent, so that the cutters might move in and hold the remaining body while she pulled its lower eyelids open to check for ledgers.

The whole matter might have been avoided if they could’ve painted some symbol on the animals, mark them as bearing official documents, but their slimy skin and regenerative healing prevented most forms of permanent mark.

A firefly of motivation was enough to alert the grazing worms, so the hunters acted in unison, driving all bayonets into the seam just as the hatchets underneath bit purchase. Euuurnk! bleated the worm. It shook a rain of leaves from where it fed. Both juveniles vocalized their shock as well, but they had not the presence of mind needed to defend each other, so they simply vanished back down their holes.

“Finally,” Rutledge grumbled when he heard the smack of the worm’s head’s hit Evidentia’s characteristically pale leaf litter. He stepped out from his cover and rapidly approached the beast, able to walk through its gap just as it split in two like saloon doors. Hatchet hunters on the back half played a tug of war with the worm’s lingering brainless spasms, pulling segment after segment out of the ground.

Those at the head had a tougher time, as the remaining segments proved quite spirited, bucking them off one or two at a time. Normally slipping the toe of her boots under its chin would have stilled the worm sufficiently, but this time Blueberry was knocked onto her back by it. Two more aggressive nods put the entire weight of its head on her stomach and pinned her legs.

Fear strengthened it, she guessed. Its giant eyes had seen how many worms had been taken out of the ground of late. Despite the intent she was now flushed with, none of it was lethal. But the worm was not safe, not with Rutledge about.

“Having trouble?” the man asked, leaning into view. He threw both arms on top of its thrashing head, pretended to hold it down.

“No,” the girl growled through gritted teeth. “Wagner, that one.” She pointed her arm at the opera eye closer to Rutledge; her dog-tail anatimal obeyed and spiraled across the limb to then dump itself in the fissure of the drooping lower eyelid. Once slithered all the way into the pouch the partial-pet curled and flexed, forcing the lid open like a coin purse so that its master could see inside.

No ledger. Inside the eyelid was the only place they could affix papers without them being ripped off by the worm’s tunneling. It made the work of checking them most difficult, but never so much as just then, poor Blueberry realized. With a miserable cold seep in the small of her back, she begged Pursuitia to make its other eyelid, the one she held like the lip of a canoe, empty as well.

She was right there, and so was Rutledge. If Wagner had found a ledger the Founder would have been the closer, and thus the one to read it. Another thrash reminded her there was no time left for wishing; her peers could only hold the worm so long without either losing it or dooming it to death from fatigue.

A swift pull allowed her to stick her head inside the lid, where she found exactly what she didn’t want to, crusted to the interior like a barnacle by dried ocular mucosae. It was even perfectly legible, protected by its own enchanted authority from the emissions of the beast, so she had no excuse for being slow.

“Go on, read it!” Rutledge barked at her, sneering. Rather deliberately, he lifted his arms slightly so she could see the tiny gap between him and the opera worm, see that he did not contribute to holding it down. She couldn’t remove it either, to then read at leisure, for the documents were supposed to stay with the worms and be checked regularly.

“Ledger of harvest from wild opera worm,” she coughed through its lurching struggle, but she hadn’t read the words, simply remembered them since placing the ledgers was also a thankless dirty task, and thus left to the young.

“Hurry it up,” the Founder snapped. “And speak up. I can’t hear you over this thing.” The worm was bleating loud, begging. If she rolled it off that would be disobedience, and there was a different ledger somewhere in Independence Hall with her name on it where they recorded all such misbehavior. Such documents were no laughing matter in their world of three titles.

“It says,” she tried, focusing on the one at hand and eye, “segments taken safel- no- shortly upon the 15th hour of… a day.”

“Which day!?!”

“There’s an F!” she shouted back. “Friday! Friday! They took-“

“It’s no use girl, I can’t hear anything with this damn moaning!” Apparently its fight for survival had robbed him of the joy of pressuring her, so he stepped back and raised the musket slung over his shoulder. He was the only one to bring a loaded weapon; even the intent lingering in the finger oils on the musket ball was visible to the worms.

Its sparkle panicked the opera worm greatly, and it screamed as it hopped up and down on Blueberry’s chest, forcing her breath out. She fought to regain it.

“No wait! I can read it! It says-” Krack! The shot came with a puff of white smoke: the surrender flag of the worm’s life. The gentle giant stilled, slumped, sagged. Blueberry’s reflection disappeared from its pupils, leaving her staring into the bottomless pit down which all the dead were flung.

Her own tears joined the hard-working worm’s, but she sat perfectly still, letting gravity push them back into their canals. Better the Founder not see them fall. Rutledge kicked flecks of grime onto her cheek as he stepped around, bent down, and ripped the ledger free from the eyelid.

“Segments taken swiftly,” he read aloud as he paced about the dead worm’s cone of vision, “upon the 15th hour of Friday the 11th of September to the amount of…” he squinted, “22 segments or 44 hundredweights by Lady Middlebitch Flaywood and 25 accompanying Silhouettes.”

His eyes jumped from the crusty page to the thick of the forest that separated Independence Hall from Bickering. No mind was paid to the young hunters as they heaved to lift the worm and free Blueberry. She took the arm of Philemon Paca, son of Founder William Paca and a free black, but known among the youth by his Lenape-memory: Rush.

He nodded to her with understanding, implicitly reminding her to keep her upset for later, for the page. All who would listen would do so with their eyes, perhaps as early as that evening. A few of the others helped brush her off as they went to work separating the segments from the head. Waste had be minimized now.

“Wagner,” she croaked, barely lifting her limp arm. The anatimal poked out of a sagging eyelid, coiled and leapt to her, and once it was spiraled about her bicep the sensation of it vanished, matching the heat and blood-rhythm of her body. Rush and many of the others had oft expressed their envy; few bonded with any of the partial-creatures so profoundly.

“Now,” Rutledge said, speaking up so all could hear, “what is it the Bickyplots are planning to do with nearly fifty hundredweights of worm beef? They never take that much all at once.”

“They never could,” Crow Eyes, daughter of Lenape only, no Founding father and thus no Christian name, said, almost scalding the man with her tone. “This one was the longest opera worm we’ve ever seen. We didn’t know when we tagged it because there was no reason to pull it all the way out.”

“Ah, so I’ve bagged the record!” Rutledge hooted, pressing snickers into his tongue with his front teeth. He turned around to see the hunters already hard at work in stripping the head. A tap was inserted in the center of each eye to drain its beautiful blue ink, with which much magic could be scripted and posted by the draftsmen and inkwitches of Pilgrim’s Anchor.

Hunting knives were under its skin as fast as they were unsheathed. Choice morsels from the cheek would be cut out, along with the tongue and its useful integument, but the cartilaginous bone and much of the flesh would have to remain where it sat, for they had no means of transporting such heavy things effectively, as there was no horse or cart in their party. The segments were another matter, part of why only they were taken regularly, as their perfect wheel shape allowed a single individual to walk behind and roll them forward without carrying or hauling.

And so the flabby wheels’ journey to Pilgrim’s Anchor began, with the path chosen being the one that was mostly downhill. Pursuitia trees were possessive of their branches, rarely dropped them, so there were few snaps under their rolling progress, hardly a sound at all for the next few hours, and what there was consisted of Rutledge muttering to himself about Bickyplots, all that beef, and what the vile creatures might be up to.

“A colossal evil stew,” he grumbled as they passed under the creamy shades of bone and eggshell canopies, “made in the same cauldron they all sleep in no doubt, thickened with their deglazed flaking.”

Blueberry had her own theorizing, her best effort made to keep it all orderly. It would be easier to record it later if she could recall in the moments holding the pen rather than compose. Like making a shopping list. Tell her fellows about the hunt. The longest worm ever. Its death at Rutledge’s muzzle. By her bumbling literacy. In short, ladies and gentlemen, my fault once again. I submit myself for scorn. Yours, Blueberry Kidd.

Picturing the pages of her journal, and all the other journals that would come her way in response, rolling lacquered along the side of the worm segment she pushed passed the time quickly. She hardly looked up, instead following the sounds of the wheels in front of her when they needed to adjust course.

The toll of Independence Hall’s bell finally snapped her out of it. Glorious was the sound, encapsulating, as if a shield was brought over them and covered their backs as they crossed the final unsafe stretch. In a world unedited, where the Founders never lost their way and picked up Pursuitia’s by accident, the noble instrument would come to be called the Liberty Bell.

In a convergence of rivulet possibilities it was called that there too, and looked upon with great hope by all the misplaced mankind of Pilgrim’s Anchor: Founders, free blacks, and Lenape alike. Upon its dull patina was a most radiant inscription, written across the settlement a thousand times, as graffiti, as coda, as propaganda, and even flawlessly in the writings of Kidd, who was too familiar with it to ever jumble it up:

PROCLAIM LIBERTY THROUGHOUT ALL THE LAND UNTO ALL THE INHABITANTS THEREOF

It tolled every daylight hour, and during times of war, where that inscription manifested as far more than inspiration. It brought to life the very idea of liberty, expelling invaders, and providing them their ultimate weapon against the trampling attempts of the Bickyplots.

Here it had the effect of speeding up all the worm wheels, as weights were seemingly lifted from the hunters’ shoulders. When they stopped it was in orderly rows of two, parallel with the boundaries of the wooden outer gates that interrupted the mighty fence surrounding their whole settlement, constructed from the uniform trunks of Pursuitia’s trees, their pale bark covered in posted notices of surveillance and protection, splotchy wax seals of many colors joining iron nails in holding them up. Layer upon layer of their efforts to assimilate and dominate the land grew over each other in an armoring timeline of material mastery.

Something landed on Kidd’s shoulder; she cringed and slapped at it. Thinking it was Rutledge’s hand, she was relieved to see a leathery pair of pig’s ears fall at her feet. They twitched, joined at the lobes in the approximate shape of a moth. Their momentary stillness did not concern her like the death of the opera worm.

“Up now little one,” she whispered. “You’re a tough chew toy. You’ve faced worse.” The ear-moth twitched again, then flapped. Like a spirited lobed starfish it flipped itself over, then flapped noisily until it was back in the air.

Rutledge took aim with his musket, pulled the trigger, but it did no good. He’d forgotten there were no Franklin kites in the sky during their hunt, and no charge of electric fluid for him to fire now that he’d used his one solid shot on the worm. The oblivious pig-ear anatimal escaped his ire, disappearing over the fence just as the gates opened to allow the hunting party entrance.

Eyeless, mouthless, genuinely orifice-free, it was not known how the anatimals not only survived, but flourished, existing robustly and reproducing via hidden means. Many kinds lived in and about Pilgrim’s Anchor, as displaced as the humans, but better adapted in every way. Kidd knew them all, often drew them on pages meant for legal paperwork and with charcoal so as not to draw the ire of inkwitches:

Pig-ear moths, skittering chicken feet, trundling urchins of raccoon teeth, squirrel tail inchworms, lolloping cow’s udders flapping their teats disrespectfully, rabbits’ feet so lucky they balanced and hopped by their lonesome, bubbled frog-throats dancing on the breeze, slithering spotted salamander torsos, feathery fish gills plastered to pond bottoms in both pink and red, beaver tails rafting down rougher bodies, antlers grown like bracket fungi on all things as prickly and unwanted as a stowaway cactus, and many more, including an assortment of serpentine tails that behaved much like snakes hybridized with precocious children.

Wagner, of a dog varietal, was just one such tail, rescued by Blueberry from a bundle of twisted bedding where it had sought warmth, and never turned over to the butchers, as was required when one was caught. There were no whole livestock of Earth from Pilgrim’s Anchor, only pieces and parts, and seeing as the anatimals made themselves a great nuisance with their blind and mute thriving, they were expected to give back what they could.

Most bore little meat, and were tough and sinewy at that, but some like the udders were a godsend in their utility. Despite not being attached to a cow, they produced milk at the very same rate as an entire animal, and needed no grass or water to fuel them. Indeed it was not uncommon to ruin one’s day in Pilgrim’s Anchor quite early in the morning by stepping into a puddle of milk and drenching your socks.

The hunters were celebrated upon their return, cheered on as they rolled their prizes to the butchery street. Along the way they passed the outer lodgings, both bark domes braced with branch cages and longhouses partly of brick, where most of the Lenape and free blacks resided, but it was not where many of the young would go to sleep, despite their mothers mostly living there. Those with Founding Fathers had finer beds, in rooms of their own inside the expansions to Independence Hall.

High Water, mother of Crow Eyes, appeared alongside the procession and made hushed discussion with her daughter. She was a stone-faced woman with a large curving nose and streaks of gray in her hair. Though her outward expression was unkind, Blueberry knew her only as compassionate, for she had originally instituted the Lenape-memory: a tradition in which all the children born of mankind in Wormland would be named after something the Lenape cherished and missed from their ancestral home.

None would claim Kidd as their child. Raised collectively, which on nights where she had irritated her caretakers meant she slept in the streets, she had a dark complexion, which had to mean a mother among the Indians or the former slaves… but none stepped forward.

High Water did, not to claim her, but give the gift of a name. According to her, blueberries were unassuming in all but color, mild and grassy in flavor, often too mushy, but a perfect one was almost white on the inside and crisp as a winter dawn. Their birth on bushes must have been, Kidd reasoned, a most wonderful surprise, akin to finding sapphires in bland stone.

The name could’ve meant young Blueberry was mushy on the inside, or that she hid a perfection all her own, and that she must be truly ready before she split her skin and showed the world what she was made of.

When High Water finished speaking with her child, making sure to punctuate the encounter with an embrace to remind Crow Eyes she was both soldier and daughter, she gave Blueberry the kindness of a glance and a nod: the most affection she ever received from an elder on the regular.

Once the convoy of wheels was delivered, with the butchery begun immediately by hanging them from hooks and chains for pull-carving, like carriages that could only be worked on from underneath, the hunters were free to disperse and use the evening as they pleased.

For most of them that meant going to their journals to record the day’s events and thoughts, handed off to a peer in time enough before lanterns-out to read the entries. Afforded little privacy thanks to the great need of their youthful and skilled labor, the Founders and other elders encouraged the bookkeeping as therapeutic, as practice for sorcery drafting, and as silent receptacles for complaints they would rather not hear.

Blueberry kept hers, a humble black book titled with silver cloudliner ink, for making hopes into realities, in a bindle with her sparse other belongings, to be carted from room to room each night, as she had no permanent home more specific than Pilgrim’s Anchor. After exchanging her wheel of worm beef for it she went to one of the bedrooms in Independence Hall where she knew she would be welcome: that of Scudder Hart.

Nothing would make Rutledge, and most of the other Founders, angrier than that, and angering them would help her sleep well after the poaching of the mighty yet defenseless worm she would have to spend the next months eating as chunks in stew, as pemmican, and as jerky. The old codgers might think they were sharing a bed when the lamps went out, that their precious, luminous, chosen son, as if somehow sired by all of them at once in some kind of nauseatingly self-important ceremony like one of their mass signings, was sullying his stock with the black and brown girl apparently spawned from nothing at all.

Scudder wouldn’t of course. Virile as any of the strapping young lads he was, but that was not the nature of their relationship, his heart already signed, sealed, and delivered to another, though she was also dark enough of skin, hair, and eye to needle his forebears with the activities and goings-on of his prick.

All because he was purely white. Their pearl in muddy waters. Upon bumbling through their first signing and casting themselves into another world, Blueberry often delighted in imagining them holding onto their powered wigs and baying like slapped heifers as the stone of Independence Hall skipped across the waters of all words to sink in Pursuita, the Founders saw that of the handful of white women cursed to come along, only one was still young enough to bear.

She was of no import to them aside from her womb, and perhaps it was this negligence that caused her to die in the process of birthing Scudder. The man she’d taken up with, John Hart, was already of substantial age, but the advantage of that was he had experience with his many children back home, though they were raised more by his wife and none of his family had been brought along.

Scudder, like Blueberry, had no mother or father in the singular sense, as John passed away from persistent gravel in the kidneys just two years after he was born. This left him as the only heir to the dynasty of Independence Hall and its disparate characters who could barely agree on freeing themselves from the British empire, let alone on the tenets of raising the ultimate man to carry on their various causes.

All their other children existed to serve him one day, though they never said such a thing outright. For his part, Scudder was a remarkable young man despite their best efforts to corrupt him early with high chairs of station. Friendship was chief among his priorities, and he was slow to violence, and sensitive enough to let tears fall when there was something to water with them.

It was advantageous to treat him as a leader of the younger generation as well, solely because of the privileged access he had to all the Founders’ documents and plans as they were drafted and inked. Each week he swore secrecy with his hand over his heart, and he kept his word technically, telling not a soul, only his journal, but then the book swam its way around Anchor.

Liked by all, he was even given a Lenape-memory despite having no parentage amongst them or the similarly Founder-maligned blacks. Though she had never pointed it out, having no desire to harm him herself, Blueberry made note of the fact that Scudder asked for the name, and was not initially gifted it. He was good, but still bound in the framing cage of his privileges. He assumed he could ask, where she would never assume such a thing.

The request was granted. Muster Hart. Blueberry wondered how one missed ‘mustering’. It didn’t have to be for battle. You could muster for a celebration, if you planned it strictly enough. Or maybe the Lenape missed it because the process called people from all around for a single purpose. That could no longer be done in Pilgrim’s Anchor. Everyone knew everyone else, and they were all bound to the same chain.

Regardless, it was a good name, for it could be used in relative safety even with an ill-tempered Founder insistent upon their golden boy’s Christian name nearby, for it could be explained away as mishearing ‘mister’, which was nothing but the innocent respect Scudder surely deserved, those with darker skin insisted whilst blinking rapidly to fan away suspicion with their eyelashes.

His room in the hall was by far the largest, and held two beds to discourage him from getting too cozy with the late night visitors he would surely have over, as the Founders were too old and tired to assign a guard at his door every night. That night, after Blueberry was welcomed in but the lamps and violet worm-tallow candles were not yet snuffed, she looked over at him, from her temporary bed to his permanent throne of one, and used her own affectionate corruption of his name.

“And what was Mustard doing while we followed worms all day?” She didn’t know the paste, nor the plant, but some inert seeds had come over in one of the hall’s surrounding kitchens in a clay jar, making it an urn since the plant was technically extinct in Pursuitia. In tasting some of those seeds, by thievery excused entirely based on the smallness of the goods, she knew the flavor. It was strong, pungent, and likable, but clearly not in excess.

So she called him Mustard to remind him not to assert himself too aggressively, lest he offend her palate and ruin a good thing. It kept him in check, a bridle he humbly accepted from her most of the time, including just then as he looked up from the stack of journals that weren’t his and smirked with such whip-crack skill that you could hear the smile being exhaled out his nose.

“They had me in drafting, trying to make a tin horse go. But first I had to watch Inkwitch Eleanor brew gold leaf until the quill would take it, which takes over two hours by the way. Staring at those bubbles all that time gave me enough nerve to suggest we tip over the Liberty Bell and use it as a cauldron to see what kind of ink comes out. You should’ve seen her face, which was nothing compared to Jefferson’s.”

Suppressing a snort of laughter, Blueberry kept her eyes on his face, and not on the pile of books that was presented to him every day. His opinion was needed on everything from anatimal training to the scripts for the coming winter to the Carve-Out itself, the project so core to the younger generation that it had never been discussed aloud. If their private journals didn’t exist, neither did the Carve-Out.

Blueberry held a journal that wasn’t her own as well, but just the one, and she knew it was given to her out of pity, and she would only get through a few pages if she didn’t want to be at it all night. She had chores in the morrow. Not officer-in-training work like making tin horses go, but still. The pity belonged to Autumn Middleton, Founder-daughter, and she often used simple sentences to help Kidd along, but just then she was too distracted by Muster.

He wasn’t made handsome by his features, oval and doughy as his face was, but by the river of curiosity coursing out of his eyes that splashed everyone around. Sometimes the front of his corn silk hair was an eagle-attacked nest, his own hand the eagle, his reaction to any new ideas or developments he found particularly interesting, which was most of them. With such inundating passion, like storm swells crashing on the decks of an already leaking ship, it was no wonder Lucretia Paine, gifted the name Bonfire by the Lenape, kept his heart so trussed up.

Muster and Blueberry bantered a bit before returning to their reading, but some time later he was making more of his involuntary noises, startled like a rabbit slipping in hay and frantically righting itself as he made his way through one particular entry.

“What is it?” she asked, drawing his attention. He looked as if he’d just remembered she was present. Knowing all her friends’ journals by quirks of their covers, Blueberry was able to glance at the one in his hands and recognize it as the property of Caesar Rodney II, who had the unusual Lenape-given name of Unmarked.

It commemorated unmarked graves, or more specifically the feeling that was the knowledge of standing over an unmarked grave. A memory in the air rather than the stone. It may also have been an ice pick insult to the boy’s father, who was the sort of man who would claim he had freed many of his slaves without clarifying it was only after they were made useless to him by age or injury.

Caesar the first was certainly not ‘unmarked’, suffering as he did from a disfiguring cancer of the face, often hidden from sight by a tightly-wrapped green scarf, another of which his son often wore in solidarity with the multiple prongs of his pain.

Relevant to Unmarked’s unique position, his father’s illness had caused him to offer himself as the primary apprentice of Benjamin Franklin, who was the sole person to bear the title of Master of Sciences in Pilgrim’s Anchor, perhaps only rivaled by the Bickyplot Eggnonce Chattelpool, if his blasphemous experimentation in unnaturalism could be counted among the sciences.

Mr. Franklin, who was too deep in his studies of the electrical fluid for it to be called a hobby well before the signing, insisted, sometimes wrongly, that it served a thousand and one purposes, and each time he caught a bolt in one of his rods or Leyden jars by night as if it were nothing more than a firefly, nothing more than the firefly-abdomen anatimals that sometimes fell as glowing rain, he insisted in the morning that he’d discovered yet another use for it. In his laboratory, a barn with the highest ceiling they could build from which he hung the prototypes of his many brass war kites, he tried to put it to use in weaponry, forging, drafting, animal husbandry, agriculture, bathing, and in the case of the elder Rodney, medicine.

Unmarked helped the aging Mr. Franklin, who now past his ninetieth year and walking with the aid of an electric cane, the function of its charge unclear, unless zapping anyone he poked with it was the purpose, could only see if he looked all the way down and through the spectacles clinging to the end of his nose, in development of possible electrical treatments for his father.

All were futile, and the man was nearing the end of his life, but Unmarked was fittingly shifting into his, taken as he was by Mr. Franklin’s enthusiasm, and his kind heart softened by dotage, at least among the Founders. If there was something the Founders hadn’t announced yet, some physical manifestation of it was being put together in the lab, and the young were hearing about it through Unmarked’s journal.

“It’s the latest from the laboratory,” Muster said, “but it’s no experiment… It’s something they never even tried. It’s gnawing at them… at Jefferson at least.” Slow at reading, Blueberry nonetheless had an excellent tactical mind. She knew weaknesses immediately, and her usual gentle swaddling of them shouldn’t be mistaken for an unwillingness to exploit them. Muster told her most information that came his way to get her perspective; the only one that might overhear was Wagner, which once again demonstrated its deafness as it slithered out of Blueberry’s neckline and wrapped around her neck for its latest nap.

“Go on,” she urged, stroking the anatimal as if it were her own long hair.

“Listen to this.”

Journal of Caesar ‘Unmarked’ Rodney

The day of September 17th, 1796

Muster was shirking his duty. What Unmarked had witnessed was potentially very important indeed, but it didn’t carry the personal weight of the document folded in half in one of the other journals that young master Hart had deliberately moved to the bottom of the stack, as if the collective weight of the other records might flatten it out of existence.

The others wanted him to sign, in the best and most appropriate ink he had, on the plain and straight line they’d drawn for him. If he did it was permanent, even if he refused to act any further in the position. Regardless of performance, or the state of the organization, Muster Hart would forever be the president of the Junior Congress, which was then only known to three individuals over the age of twenty-five, High Water among them.

The Junior Congress existed to create the Carve-Out. The Carve-Out would save them, mostly by addressing them, when the Founders drafted and signed their new declaration, to amend the old that had started the entire Evidentia/Pursuitia/Wormland affair. An affair that was now in its twentieth year.

Twenty years without a single Bickyplot head taken, permanently anyway, and not a single signature gotten. In trying to acquire these items the Founders had taken plenty of losses, to age, to the Bickering War, to unfamiliarity with the land in which they had dropped anchor. Each day they grew more bitter, more resentful of the new lives they were forced to build in order to continue, and of the children they sired with the Lenape and their former slaves, all of whom were dragged along in the signing by idiosyncratic proximity or an inscrutable web of overlapping documents that were never properly translated or transferred.

A new declaration would send them back, not just to Earth, but if they worded everything correctly on the correct paper with the correct ink, to the very moment they were forcibly separated from it. That was the idea assigned to the draftsmen, and they had many good candidates already, but all were useless without either the defeat or participation of the Bickyplots, who had dropped anchor long before and had seen to tying up all legal loose ends swiftly. In the magic of drafting those thirteen shambling evils, those towers of rancid garbage and devilish edifice, held all the deeds, even to the very lives of the mild-mannered and oblivious natives: the Silhouettes.

It was impossible not to hate them, but Muster and his cohort did recognize that, technically, they owed their very lives to the barony of Bickering. Without their obstruction the Founders never would’ve resorted to spawning and raising up children in Pursuitia to fight for their return to Earth.

But the Bickyplots could only ever incidentally be their allies, and only very briefly. In order to draft a reality that would allow the young to flourish they had to engage in subterfuge, trickery, and a self-taught silent war for their own perception of themselves.

Muster’s pangs of guilt got worse with every line he read out of Unmarked’s latest entry, for it was clear he wasn’t avoiding his responsibilities to his peers, even with almost as much to lose as the first and last white man of the land.

If the Carve-Out was to work, they would need at least one Bickyplot signature, and seeing as they intended to attach it without the Founders’ knowledge or permission, that signature had to be acquired secretly. One of the best methods of secrecy in Pilgrim’s Anchor was to use some inscrutable mechanism from Benjamin Franklin’s workshop, often so complicated and cockamamie in both inspiration and design that finding the motivation to investigate what they were and why they were was difficult.

Unmarked could take anything from that lofty barn and its seasonal drafts of brilliance, walk right out the door with it, and face little scrutiny. If any adult stopped him for interrogation he could claim an electric pepper mill was a back massager, an electric noose a butter warmer, an electric boot polisher a miniature plow for spice gardens, so and so forth without anyone but Mr. Franklin able to contradict him.

Muster had not signed the document yet, not officially been declared the president of the Junior Congress, but he’d been acting in that capacity for some time, and had been the one to propose and assign such a mission to Unmarked. Together they had conceived of a device, small enough to easily conceal, and entirely believable as the whim of the lightning-struck bat Franklin, that could potentially secure the signature of a Bickyplot.

In order to assemble it a number of parts would have to be stolen from the laboratory and modified, as would some of the records, all of which was accessible by Unmarked. The process was well underway, and half of the components for the handheld cylinder were already hidden under beds and nestled into knotholes alongside peanut-shaped chipmunk cheek anatimals.

The latest requirement was a strong spring, as they’d broken the thinner ones acquired from the lesser weapon and machining workshops where Franklin’s thoroughly tested designs had become the routine production of their electric muskets, drums and deployable kites, and electric hatchets.

Rodney’s entry stated he successfully acquired the spring, but in the process overheard something that needed to be passed along to the president of the Junior Congress, whether or not he had accepted the office yet. The apprentice was sure to describe the entire event in detail, in so doing all but reproducing the entirety of Franklin’s laboratory on the page, filling Muster’s mind with his own memories of walking through the place. He felt like he was there, crouched alongside Unmarked as they crept between the workbenches, probing drawers for springs.

Technically the drafty building was the tallest structure in Pilgrim’s Anchor, artificially elevated as it was by a small forest of pronged metal antennae used to harvest lightning from Pursuitia’s storm clouds. To feed Anchor’s war machine they also needed fields of thicker rods for the same purpose, which existed beyond the fencing and had air alive with the electric fluid, like sparks and dot-embers landing on the skin without leaving burns.

Inside the barn was much more of a mess, though the papers were well-organized, given their tendency to randomly catch fire if placed between the wrong metal plates, even if they were separated by an opera worm’s length. Franklin did not discard any of his failures, as useful metal ores were not the most common of Pursuitia’s resources. Everything that could be stripped for parts slowly would be, and if its copper, or conductive gold, or sturdy iron was needed elsewhere in another shape it would then have only as much as was needed melted down and repurposed.

Unmarked had crept right under the watering can head of the first electric shower in his clandestine scouring, feeling its tingle in his follicles despite his master’s claim that it hadn’t held a charge for more than six months. It must have been residual from the laboratory’s air itself, as the rods above were often singing with it like glass harmonicas and tuning forks.

Plenty of patchy monoliths, which Unmarked was often told to polish despite their disuse, sat around, finding new purpose as the boy hid behind them each time he heard a noise that might be the pop of Mr. Franklin’s electric cane. Muster read that the fifth time he hid, in this instance behind a mounted electric saddle that supposedly kept the legs and buttocks from falling asleep during long tin horse rides, it actually was because of the arrival of the Master of Sciences, alongside another individual: Thomas Jefferson.

A stone-faced man, primarily visible only when he was still, his charisma cooled to lake ice, Jefferson was a founder among Founders, and felt particularly robbed by the Evidentia affair, perhaps sensing that had it not occurred he would be close to his time in the highest office of the world’s newest country.

His new world was not small, or devoid of its own charms, but he thought himself deep in the mastery of his home world, close to completion of it, and so was most aggressive developing the new declaration, and in making war on the Bickyplots toward the goal of its ratification.

This made him an angry man, always fuming, storming about Pilgrim’s Anchor in a manner that suggested he could supply just as much lightning as the sky to their various drums and kites to be held in escrow until it was delivered to its new home: a seared white-smoke shaft deep in Bickyplot flesh.

And so he stood, like a lightning rod disgruntled and bent toward the nearest thunderhead, in stark contrast to the portly and jovial Franklin, bald head stooped over his burnished and dulled talons gripping the head of his cane, like an owl newly interested in the mechanics of his own grip as its weakening finally threatened him with gravity and grave.

On his person, aside from the cane, were the magnetized buttons of his waistcoat, the luminous bookmark dangling from the thin flexible philosophy book tucked therein, like a glowworm to read by, and his electric spectacles ringed with brighter light, the lenses endlessly alive with the flow of electric fluid like waves, as if he took joy in watching the world drown in the stuff.

Muster, filtered through Unmarked by his writings and several hours, hid behind the saddle and listened in on Jefferson’s vented frustrations, taking note that Mr. Jefferson must have gone straight from supervising his ink brewing lesson to the laboratory, some of his agitation perhaps fueled by Muster’s joke about having his next lesson stew in the Liberty Bell. Muster read Unmarked’s best paraphrasing of their whole conversation, inserting their names an excessive number of times to make the speaker of each line clear:

“-What do you make of it Ben?”

“It’s not a matter of what I make of it Tom, but what our thirteen friends at Bickering Hall make of it. It is an awful lot of worm beef. I heard Rutledge killed the poor beast. Such slaughter here is as egregious as it is on Earth. Those worms may not be our god’s creatures, but they belong to someone.”

“Get off your high horse and consider having it for supper in these hard times Ben, like the rest of us. Evidentia’s no place for your flirtations with vegetarianism.”

“Flirtations! See here Tom, that’s not a fair assessment. There have been a few years where I was so committed to that dietary bride that I would not even eat things cooked in fat.”

“And now you’re the one asking for second helpings of duck, gout be damned.”

“Of duck breast Tom. The breast, which exists entirely isolated from the duck here. Yes it’s covered in feathers, and glides in the pond, and dives just as well, but all of that is merely the memory of the flesh. An anatimal exists in the physical medium of the animal, but the spirit of the vegetable, and that spirit practically begs to be consumed.

Really, I should like to take their innovation back with us, give all the world’s vegetarians steaks and fillets served in a consomme of clear conscience! No lamb slaughtered ever again, just the pruning of ears, lips, and tails that grow back like any other crop.”

“And do their health benefits match those of the vegetables you always used to rave about, eh Ben?”

“The anatimal health benefit occurs entirely on the tongue Tom, just as valid an organ, and just as in need of care and attention as any other within the body.”

“Never mind all that. I came to ask what you think those fiends are doing with enough worm to encircle the world. Is it just food, or can they brew ink from it?”

“Doubtful Tom. All the inks we take from it are harvested from the head, and they left the creature alive, which again is a great embarrassment for us, seeing as Rutledge decided to act more cruelly than the Lady Flaywood!”

“Don’t call any of them lady Ben, please, you’ll turn my stomach. The female sex cannot be among them; the idea’s too disturbing. We haven’t seen one of them with child or babe. Surely they’re spawned from piles of muck like fungal stalks, or perhaps their soil is stacks of rotten bureaucracy, which we so foolishly mimicked in our first declaration.”

“So we’re back to Tom’s vegetarianism are we? You’re still blaming your concession on the passage?”

“Those one hundred and sixty-eight words may well be the difference between our lives now and those we intended. I know they would’ve made a difference if they’d been included, if only to drop us here with a much more sizable force at our disposal Ben.”

“Yes, we were the Committee of Five, and just five, until the editing pen came out. Then it was a feast of grasping hands and spilled mingling gravies.”

“They blamed us, despite the committee having nothing to do with this end result. Livingston isn’t even here! Who knows where he was thrown? And when they sharpen that blame it lands solely on me, like a nail through my hand, to prevent me from writing them any worse fates! I say it was them Ben, and their edits, that did this to us. My draft was perfect; it was the future of the world. It spoke of all men, and so if it still cast us so far afield it would have done so with all men at our side!”

“You intend to include a version of the passage in the final draft then, Tom?”

“I do. The time feels near to me as well. The Bickyplots grow as weary of us as we do of them. We must have that draft ready after our final confrontation with them, whether they are to sign it or nullify their ownership of Evidentia with their deaths.”

“Do you think the worm beef is part of some plot equivalent to our second declaration Tom?”

“I do. Perhaps a small part, only tangential. If it’s for food, why would they need so much more than they usually take? Are they planning to expand their forces in some abominable fashion? Have they figured out how to recruit more from the hell they are native to?”

“Or one of them has fallen pregnant, or sown a field with their spoor.”

“And there’s my stomach turned Ben, thank you. I’ll leave you to your tinkering before I get my eyebrows blackened again, but do I have your support on the reinsertion of the passage?”

“The Committee of Five is the closest family I’ve known in all my life Tom. I know you don’t feel the bond created by this world as anything more than the most oppressive pressure, but I feel it as fraternity. You are my brother, and no ink warlock or draftsman could write that away on his best day with his steadiest hand. Yes. Adams and Sherman will feel the same.”

There Unmarked’s recounting ended, followed by several questions put to Hart as if he were already in his ethereal office. ‘Should this excised passage become part of our efforts?’ ‘Could it be the insertion point of the Carve-Out?’ Whom do I inform about it first?’

If all Muster’s answers were yes, Unmarked would already know the answer to that last question. The young had their own Committee of Five, doing what they could to emulate the Founders’ practices that were already demonstrated to hold sway in the world of Pursuitia. That committee was composed of Muster himself, Crow Eyes who represented the concerns of the Lenape, Oakes Newtown the son of two free blacks, Founder-son Pony Clark, and Founder-daughter Sassafras Whipple.

They were responsible for the drafting of the Carve-Out, and forced to match the production schedule of the Founders on their second declaration, if their goals were to be achieved simultaneously. If the elders’ time was short, so too was theirs. Thus Muster’s delay in signing his oath of office was made all the more shameful.

Once he was finished reading Unmarked’s entry he recounted it secondhand to Blueberry, who listened intently. What he did not share were his own thoughts on the younger Committee of Five. The two friends had never discussed it openly, but it was clear Kidd felt she should have been a part of it.

Its members were chosen democratically, on the merits of representation among the various factions of Anchor’s younger generation and drafting ability. Kidd had put her name in for consideration, practicing her signature beforehand so the scrawl of a child didn’t immediately disqualify her.

In the final count she hadn’t received a single vote outside of those she had secured with promises beforehand. Muster had voted for her, alongside Crow Eyes and Bonfire, and no one else.

Her argument that she represented a segment of the population was sound, but the problem came in that segment consisting entirely of her individually. She did not claim no parentage, but no parentage claimed her. She represented mystery, the starved feral come out of the woods to join the town, and while she was allowed to even the kindest among them had reservations about letting her enter any kind of office. A wild animal could be made to wear clothes, yes, but could it have dignity?

Piled atop that like an oppressive stench was her lack of drafting ability. Everyone knew she would be dictating any sections she composed, and that just didn’t feel right to most of them. Magics in Pursuitia were no trifle, and elements of authenticity, of chains of custody, and of polymath understanding seemed to enhance all results. With the stakes as high as they could be, a risk on Blueberry’s behalf could have consequences for them all.

If she knew which Founder was denying her she would gain another leg to stand on, like a human anatimal following her around to catch her on its thigh when she fell, Muster thought. Why shouldn’t I help? I’m a leg, a pair in fact, and just as many eyes. When opportunity strikes next I shall search their archives for the answer.

“They might think we’re about to face a harsher winter than usual,” Kidd guessed, choosing to refer to the mystery of the meat instead of her grievances with the pair of committees five. “It’s for their stores, and if so we’re not prepared enough in rations or drama.”

“We can always make more of the latter,” Muster said. “Everything scandalizes our forebears.”

“Yes, their precious Mustard could stub his toe. That would frighten them enough to set the town ablaze.” A trifle sharper than he was comfortable with, her jab quieted him. “But we’ll all figure out what needs to be done at the fair.” Her pivot didn’t settle his mind, only brought the blank line on the parchment back to the forefront.

The Pilgrim’s Anchor fair was the last celebration before winter set in. The Stoking Dramas did come after, but despite their format being drawn from one of Earth’s oldest entertainments, their purpose was utilitarian, and thus could hardly be called a holiday. No, their function was only to warm their homes enough for them to make it from the fair to Christmas with their blood unfrozen.

Every soul in Anchor would be in attendance at the fair, dispensing food or receiving it, judging games or playing them, or deciding whether or not they would line up to be a test subject for whatever series of half-successful mechanisms Mr. Franklin rolled out of his laboratory on wheels that left black scorches in the grass.

A chance it was also, for the young to discuss everything semi-openly without moving more slowly through their journals. Of course children huddled together at such times, to discuss how to divide remaining sweets, or who had to play on which team, and certainly not the rate at which they needed to steal machine parts and ink bottles to ratify a piece of reality for themselves.

And all those whispers and eyes would be aimed the way of Scudder Hart, at which point he might have to explain that he had not yet accepted the role of president. Such an act might immediately disqualify him for the office. What could be more irresponsible than leaving them leaderless at the start of their only political summit of the year?

Not an embarrassment he planned to suffer. That much was clear, even in the candle dim. He would sign, and before they put the lights out, but he still wasn’t ready. Everything down to the confidence with which he wrote would play some effect on the document, on his position… so how to sign? Scudder Hart? Muster Hart? Scudder Muster Hart? Scudder ‘Muster’ Hart? ‘Muster’ Scudder Hart?

Out of his dresser came a bundle of letters: the most relevant reference documents he could think of at the moment. Each was a declaration of love from his beloved Bonfire. He flipped through them. What exactly did she call him, and in what contexts?

Today in my ink witchery lessons I’ve found this ink. Do you like it? It is difficult to see on the page, light as it is, but that gives the words more weight my Hart. You’ll remember holding it less, reading it less, but the message more, as if it was sent directly from my spirit to yours. And with this great power I would like to say that I love you.

He could hardly declare himself President ‘My Hart’.

Then we foraged for fallen cloudliners, which shrivel into perfect spirals, but every now and again you find one bent into a peculiar shape. I spotted one hanging from a dead branch on its dead grippers that resembled a clover.

If I had to guess each section of its body contracted separately, avoiding something as much as it could in its death throes. Well out of reach of us, I know of only one creature that might try and snag it, that being one of the taller Bickyplots out for a stroll. Impestle mayhaps. Close to thirteen feet she stands, if we’re allowed to count the arch of her neck as her peak instead of the crown of her paintbrush head.

Oh Muster, those foul things haunt me. When I see sign of them I see them as if they were standing there. Their authority runs so deep here, no doubt in ink pools in caverns. It would not shock me to learn they’d posted a notice of no trespassing on the gates of Pursuitia’s Hell, if it has one.

He looked through the entire stack, to find that not once had she called him Scudder, his first name, used before in his family, but in a world he knew only as longing. Nor did he recall Bonfire ever calling herself Lucretia, not after receiving her Lenape-memory. She did not long for Earth.

To her the Carve-Out was still of the greatest necessity, for she could not stop the Founders from trying to undo everything, but given the choice Pursuitia was her home. Deeply in love with the bookworm world, its crisp air like bites of bitter apple, Bonfire was always talking about a native plant she loved, a native animal, a unique weather phenomenon, and so on.

In direct opposition was her hatred of the Bickyplots. Though both their civilizations were guilty of colonization, she was sure Bickering Hall and its members had done so on purpose, cast themselves like musket balls and hooted in victory as they crawled out of and admired the crater-wound they’d put in Pursuitia.

Muster counted himself lucky he didn’t have to tumble a name like any of theirs in search of the best variation to sign with. Even their monikers were gross and excessive, like desserts ruined once topped with the burnt sugar and outdated vanilla they were cooked in. Hamishand Glazemouth. Impestle Hissmidge. Blacknib Bileby.

Stop frightening yourself. You have a good name. Two good names branching from the surname, like a divining rod. Both point the way. Yet form demands a decision. Where does the rod point? And do I point it, or do the ghosts on the wind?

“Mustard? Are you lost somewhere?” Blueberry asked. He looked over and saw she was nestled down into a pillow so fluffy it nearly devoured her head, stuffed as it was with the wool from a slithering sheep-carpet anatimal. “Should we put out the lights? Then you’ll know you’re in the darkness.”

“Sorry, of course. One last matter for the day.” He removed everything hiding the oath of office, took a quill from his bedside along with an unstoppered bottle of subterranean black: the ink that bubbled out from under Pursuitia’s soil and was meant for writing plain truths with no frills. No one could find the hesitation in his signature, for he had placed it elsewhere.

I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the Junior Congress of Pilgrim’s Anchor, and will to the best of my ability, compose, enact, and defend the documents declaring our Congress legal, just, and true.

Muster Scudder Hart

Introduction to Ink Witchcraft

by

Inkwitch Gladiola Newtown

Draftsmen have to deal with paper. There is intent in the substance already, and all messaging is their domain. Inks have emotions, not goals. Consider yourself extraordinarily lucky student, as there are far fewer emotions than goals in these chaotic worlds of the maelstrom we have only just learned of these brief years ago.

Evidentia has, in the lands surrounding us alone, over four hundred varieties of tree and shrub that can be used to create paper and paper blends. Over half those demonstrate some form of adapted-intent, allowing them to keep some of their leaves and warm themselves through the winter (where the others simply go bare as those non-firs of Earth do).

Making one’s own message compatible enough with that of the page is a nightmare, a headache that could debilitate a mountain, but it isn’t ours (and we should talk of this with the draftsmen little so they don’t get any ideas about pushing some of this labor onto us). So few men pursue the title of ink warlock that they’re not likely to figure it out on their own, and if they do self-preservation will convince them to sign and side with us lucky ladies (who are so rarely afforded the luck of a man).

Our luck lies in a small number, and that is the number of magically viable inks drawn from Evidentia, each plain by its distinct color, though we can make many modifications in warmth, consistency, bleed, and drying with mixing and brewing techniques that you will learn here. I will not list that blessed small number here exactly, for there is some argument over whether certain ones should be divided into their own identifiers, but even if they were we would still be lucky.

Here are those inks and their sources, mostly undivided, for simplicity’s sake:

Subterranean Black: This introductory ink is as basic as they come in every respect. Sourcing it is as simple as not watching where you step, its puddles as common in the wilderness as those of milk are in Pilgrim’s Anchor. Likely formed by longstanding decomposition of trees and moss (which is then pressed by the ground and concentrated), this ink is black and has a luster only in the strongest light of day once dry.

Its purpose is plain language and plainer purpose. Black changes one thing or state to another, and gains power with more and more relevant signees. It puts the giddyup in a tin horse. It locks doors so that a pen in the right hand is the only key. This is for contracts, orders, clear modifications of inert items, and purposes you do not wish to burden with magic at all.

Cloudliner Blue: This pale blue ink darkens on the page, and again if what is written comes to pass; it is derived from the film sacs of the cloudliner worm: a modest worm by Evidentia standards at only an arm’s length. As this worm lives primarily airborne, crawling across the surface of clouds like maggots on cheese, there are two methods of sourcing them.

First is the far simpler of the two: wait for them to die. Their lifespan is short, and broods tend to live together on the same clouds, with some transference when they merge or break apart. As they hatch together they die together, falling to the ground in a harmless fashion in spirals like the mealy-pedes of Earth.

Second, if they are in short supply, a grid of Franklin kites can be launched to their height, and an electrical current passed between them, which will cause them to die on a schedule more befitting us, though they fall in much the same fashion afterwards, just with an unpleasant burning smell.

This ink introduces us to more abstract purposes. It is the ink of hope, of inspiration, of dreams and desire. It is used to write what you wish to be true, with the act of writing and signing increasing the chances it will come to fruition. The more reasonable your request the more likely it is to be granted.

A wish on a strip of paper, in this ink, ritualistically committed to a well, or the wind, or the center of a book you think no one will read for a good long time, can grant many requests. The less the physical burden on the world, and the less someone else opposes it, the greater your chances.

If you want someone’s attention, and they do not already dislike you, write of them in cloudliner blue. This is how I met my husband, and I believe how we conceived our son Oakes. There’s no telling for sure when this ink makes the difference, but that doesn’t stop us from using it almost as quickly as we make it, so that we now rely on strong winds to send us fresh cloud banks to harvest.

Dreams have a price, and as always we pilgrims have found a way to make the native life pay it instead.

Emberlock Red: Flowing red-amber, but drying a very legible crimson, this is the ink of passion, and of any other greatly heightened emotion, whatever feelings distress you and that you wish to make serve another purpose.

It comes from tapping or logging the emberlock elm, or any of its close relatives. Perhaps the most emblematic trees of Evidentia, white of bark and leaf alike, smooth to the touch but for uniform diamond-shaped knots like wrapped tile work, they do not grow to any great girth, but provide plentiful ink and paper supplies regardless.

Not alone among the intent-trees, the emberlocks nonetheless display its purpose most clearly. Dendritic marks on the leaves mimic script, which mimics passionate scribbling, which provides a false body heat in the winter months the way a good book can warm a man who should by all means freeze to death.

When we take the ink it is to swear something. Revenge. Love. Lifetime vows. With cloudliner blue we ask the world to grant our requests, and with emberlock red we hold ourselves to our own intention to handle them alone. To fail what you have written in this ink is to hurt yourself doubly, and to succeed can cause much boastful pride, but it holds people to their word and keeps them from numbing on subjects where their vigilance may be ever-needed.

Operatic Purple: Straight from the eyes of the giant opera worm, largest known animal native to Evidentia, comes an ink that will not allow you to forget the trouble gone to in the process of acquisition. People who were not there, and who do not know you, will know how and what you took from the gentle serpent.

Operatic purple is the ink of pomp, ceremony, proclamation, and volume. It is, perhaps, the worst way to keep a secret in all the worlds of the maelstrom. Being near a document inscribed in this particular hue will allow you to know what is written, whether you read it or not. When posted in the town square the whole town will know immediately, like a letter delivered through your ear.

There is also a tendency for it to drown out other inks attempting to work magics upon their purposes. While the purple may achieve nothing in those purposes, the sheer noise of it neutralizes the others, so this is also the ink of obstruction, of distraction, and has come to be a telltale sign that its user has no regard for the well-being of a man or his situation, only that all eyes, ears, and minds are turned their way. Once you are known for your purple prose, you are cursed to be known for nothing else.

Our dear enemies the Bickyplots make such liberal use of this ink that their signatures can be heard at dawn and dusk, like cracks of lightning, or rips in the paper sky.

Fanning Green: Now we come to my personal favorite, and the most neglected of the primary base inks. You, my student, are here judged prematurely, for you are surely young; it is the youth who have become the bulk of Pilgrim’s Anchor and thus perpetrated the neglect. Fanning Green requires patience, and, to generalize, it is not in your hearts and limbs.

To make fanning green you need only gather the mosses off the forest floor and boulders (if you are looking for the highest concentration do target boulders that appear to have unnatural shapes, such as faces or figures, as this may be false intent as is present in the trees). Pulp the plants in mortar and pestle, then strain for an ink so dark it is nearly black, but which will write much lighter, yet still not lighter than any moss you’ve seen.

Mosses and ferns are the only known green plants of Evidentia, with all shrubs, trees, and grasses adhering more to this world’s general scheme of color (that being whites, tans, and umbral reds), and in this incongruity there is much speculation. Being fast growing, it is wondered if we are the source, having brought with us spore and seed incidentally upon dropping anchor, the mosses then being less sluggish than us in their conquest of unfamiliar territory.

If so, then the magical quality of the ink derived comes from the world of Pursuitia, and not the plants themselves, definitively marking enchantment as mineral in origin rather than animal or vegetable.

But I digress, and, most delightfully, so too does fanning green. It carries the intent to grow, and has forgotten it cannot do so properly in ink form, trying admirably regardless. If you write something in this green and then leave it for a time, especially in a safe place near much life, it will continue to be written without your aid!

New sentences will appear, and you can catch them and their words in progress. Whatever seed you plant will be expounded upon, at length, turning into further distant diversions the longer it is left. Write about justice, and the ink will explain justice, then the people who enact justice, then the people who formulated it, then how justice is rarely done in situations where the consequences are small.

I know it is difficult for you to discern the purpose of such an ink. What do you need the world’s opinion for? Trust me when I say they are not opinions. The world speaks only facts. Do take heed however, that a fact of Evidentia may not be a fact of Earth, and through my own studies of fanning green I know the wisdoms of the two worlds are not identical either.

Your emotions are facts, simply because you have them. Try writing them in green, when they’re raw, and coming back to unfold the page you’ve left in direct sunlight. You’ll find the ink is not faded, and it has found all sorts of interesting details about those emotions of yours, and you won’t be able to dispute any of them.

If I was the ultimate authority in ink witchery, this text would be written in fanning green, with plenty of blank pages in the back for it to grow along like ivy. Then I would get to learn a few things myself.

Aetheric Opal White: Introduction to this ink is just that, as you will not be using it in these early courses. You may already know it is prohibited for anyone under the age of sixteen to use, thanks to its inherent risks and mysterious nature.

The opal white (so-called because tinges of all colors can be seen brightly in its edges) comes to us from Evidentia’s native intelligences the Silhouettes. It is a flaky pale stone, like gypsum, frequently seen as vaguely octagonal orbs carted around in their villages by the basket, and disposed of as waste.

We know not if this is a product of their bodies, like our sweat or some other less mentionable excretion, but it is produced in their settlements in great volume and with great frequency.

Aside from its unknown origin, there is some evidence it may have been used in their religion, which would be in keeping with our purposes for it as ink, but that faith has been all but eradicated by the Silhouettes’ absorption into enslavement by the Barony of Bickering.

For use only on dark paper, so it will show, the opal white is an ink of communion with the foreign, which, unfortunately, can mean several things, some of which I am not qualified to write on. Communion with the dead. Communion with the yet to be born. Communion with other worlds, but never the one you want, chaotic as the winds of the maelstrom are.

And more still. Communion with the opposite. We are all good when compared to the Bickyplots, so in communing with our opposite we can find only abject evil. To write a message (or worse, a question) in this white is to tempt fate, to not only make yourself vulnerable but announce that vulnerability exclusively to those willing and eager to exploit it.

In our desperation to hear an addendum to a loved one’s last words, or to hear from heroes we’ve never met, or to learn if our children’s children’s children know of us and are proud, we glean little from the ink’s use, and some have lost everything. Only an expert should ever attempt to draft in it, and its use in mixing is both carefully measured and only as necessary.

Lodestone Cobalt: Last in this list (though there are certainly many more esoteric base inks in very limited supply from myriad sources) is the metallic blue which, like subterranean black, comes from Evidentia’s ground.

Distinguished from cloudliner blue more so by its metallic luster than its darker color, it also has a singular quality that is difficult to put into words: a certain ‘bigness’ on the page. The ink swells, without growing. It fluctuates, but never moves. To best understand this trait, one should first witness the source mineral and its similar appearance.

Earth had many natural magnets, stones which attracted and held certain metals, and Evidentia has them too, but here the field surrounding them, at the threshold of which the metal is tugged toward it, is not invisible. Far from it. So far from invisible we made an ink out of it. It is entirely possible to break up the mineral, pulverize it, and then mix with liquid to create an ink, but this is a great waste of effort compared to simply scooping the visibly blue field off its exterior like smoke, then letting the field condense into a nearly-complete ink inside an enclosed and cooled container.

What do we do with this one? Argue. More optimistically, discuss. Lode stone cobalt, when read, generates additional thoughts than would occur from any typical script. A reader of this color will find they have a great deal more questions about the subject at hand, no matter how clear or informative the work actually is.

Like a lodestone, it attracts, only the subject is not metal, and is instead constructive thought. A document written in this color is intended to invite scrutiny, to begin or expand upon the study of something, be it a theory, philosophy, or interpretation. The most common end result is a headache: a towering block of pages from different authors all frantically exploring and finding nothing. The ‘field’ can be aggressively sustaining, and those caught in its thrall often unable to bear discarding any portion of the discourse.

It is the favorite ink of our Master of Sciences: Founder Benjamin Franklin. Not even lodestone cobalt can make any of us his equals in the study of the electric fluid, so sadly he is left discoursing with himself much of the time. Some repellents are stronger than any attractant (with one of them being the dry study of something invisible that sporadically decides to bite and burn).

Now you know the rainbow upon which we base ink witchery. If you are as astute as we hope, you’ve taken note of the shade employed here when not providing samples, and seen that it does not match any of the primaries discussed.

If you want to know what we mixed to give you at least part of what you’re experiencing now, you need but turn the page.

(continued in part two)