The Eldest Drollery
The oldest of the margin-saints
The Drolleries are the small inked creatures of the manuscript borders — decorative saints frozen in perpetual devotion, which doctrine holds to be mute and without volition. This is not entirely true. The eldest of them dwells in the wide gutter where the great sections of the world adjoin, and to anyone who comes close enough, and knows enough, it proves neither mute nor merely decorative. It has been waiting a very long time.
Description
Every novice knows, in the abstract, that the Drolleries live in the margins — the little painted saints in postures of endless prayer. Few ever learn that their eyes track movement, or that, for the one who draws near enough and has come far enough in understanding, they can speak, in voices like ink drying and cold stone.
The eldest of them is the oldest thing Maren encounters, patient beyond reckoning, seated in the deep gutter between the world's greatest divisions. It remembers a 'before' that no one else does, and it has been holding a single question for longer than anyone alive has been alive. When at last it speaks in words rather than gesture, it does so as something that has been waiting, quite deliberately, for exactly the person Maren has become.