Chapter 3: The Scroll That Got Fired
I dropped it.
Of course I dropped it. A talking scroll had just complimented me from inside a cursed vault, in the voice of a man who has already decided how much of my money he is going to take. Dropping it was the only sane reaction, and whatever you think of me by the end of all this, I want it known that I started out a sane man.
The scroll hit the floor, rolled half a turn, and kept talking like nothing had happened.
"Rude," it said. "But understandable. First contact is always a little dramatic." The brush-lines of its face rearranged into a thoughtful frown. "Pick me back up. We have a lot to discuss, and not much time, because I can feel at least three other people’s destinies drifting past me as we speak, and honestly, talent, some of them sound incredible."
I did not pick it up.
I looked at the door. I looked at the scroll. I started doing the quiet math on whether I could walk out, lock the vault, and pretend none of this had ever happened.
"You can’t, by the way," said the scroll.
"Can’t what."
"Leave me. Pretend this didn’t happen. You’re making the little math face." Its grin widened. "It’s already done, my friend. You touched me. I chose you. We are, as of about thirty seconds ago, bonded. Where you go, I go. It’s very romantic. Try not to think about it too hard."
I picked it up. Mostly so I could glare at it properly.
"What are you," I said.
It cleared its throat. It did not have a throat. It cleared it anyway, with great ceremony, and then it announced in a voice that seemed to come from somewhere much grander than a cracked scroll in a cellar:
"I am the Most Honored, Most Truthful, Most Beloved Veridical Chronicle of Ten Thousand Glorious Deeds, First Pen of Heaven, Keeper of the One True Record, Author of Legends, Singer of—"
"I’m going to call you Scroll."
"—Singer of the—what?"
"Scroll. I’m calling you Scroll."
The face went flat. "That is the most disrespectful thing anyone has ever said to me, and I once recorded the deeds of a man who insulted a dragon."
I should explain that word it kept using. Veridical. It’s a fancy word, and I only know it because it was stamped all over the worst parts of my job. It means "truthful." It means "only the true facts, nothing made up."
Which, I would soon learn, was the single funniest possible name for this thing.
Because here is what Scroll actually was(I still think he/it? is bragging).
A long time ago — Scroll was vague about how long, the way people are vague about their age when the real number would alarm you — it had a job in Heaven. A good job. The best job, if you asked it, and you didn’t have to. It was the official record-keeper of the Heavenly Records. When a hero did something worth remembering, Scroll wrote it down. Its words went straight into that giant glowing ledger in the sky, and what Scroll wrote became what the whole world believed, and what the whole world believed became true.
That’s an enormous amount of power to hand to anyone. An especially bad amount to hand to someone who, in Scroll’s own words, "found the truth a little flat."
"You have to understand," Scroll said, as I carried it up the vault stairs because it would not stop talking and I’d given up on silence. "A hero climbs a mountain. Fine. Good. But is it a story? No. Now — a hero climbs a mountain that wasn’t there yesterday, carrying his blind grandmother, while singing? That’s a record people remember. I wasn’t lying. I was improving."
"You were lying."
"I was making the truth better," said Scroll, wounded. "There’s a difference, and the difference is craft."
It turned out Heaven did not see the difference. Scroll embellished one hero too many — pumped his legend so big, so fast, made him so famous and so powerful, that the poor man couldn’t carry the weight of his own story, and something went very wrong. Scroll skipped past that part quickly. So quickly, in fact, that for half a heartbeat its loud cheerful voice went somewhere quiet and old, and the painted mountains on its paper seemed to darken, just for a moment.
"Anyway," it said, too brightly, and the moment was gone. "There was an incident. There was a hearing. There was a great deal of shouting from people who have never told a good story in their lives. And then they fired me. Stripped my rank. Tied me shut with a cheap cord, slapped a defective tag on me, and threw me in a reject bin to fade." The grin came back, sharp now. "For centuries, talent. Waiting. Listening. Hunting for the right new pen to write with. The right new—"
"No," I said.
"—main character—"
"No."
"—and then you walked in," Scroll finished, beaming, "with your sad little lantern and your sad little clipboard and a face that says you’ve already given up on every dream you’ve ever had, and I thought: yes. Oh, yes. The world loves nothing — nothing — more than a nobody who becomes everything. You, my friend, are going to be the most famous man who has ever lived."
I want you to understand what those words meant to me, specifically.
Because here is the part nobody else in that vault would have understood. I didn’t dream of being famous. I dreamed of the opposite. Six tables. A pot of broth. Five old men who’d never ask my name. I had built my whole small life around being forgotten, on purpose, because in a world where fame is power, being a nobody is the only way to be left alone. And my actual paying job — the thing I did all day, every day — was deleting people’s fame.
Scroll had found, in a city of seven hundred thousand people, the one man whose deepest wish was to be a stranger.
And it wanted to make me a legend.
"Absolutely not," I said. "I delete fame for a living. I make people less famous. That’s my whole job."
"I know," said Scroll, delighted. "It’s perfect. It’s ironic. People love irony almost as much as they love an underdog. We’re going to do numbers."
I tried to get rid of it.
I want it on the record that I tried everything a reasonable man could try. Put it back in the reject bin. It rolled out and floated up to my shoulder. Locked it in a drawer in the back office. It was sitting on my desk when I turned around, humming. I went to my own desk, pulled out a blank Retraction form — the official Bureau document for erasing a story from the Records — and I started filling it out to erase Scroll itself, because if anyone in the world could delete this thing, it was a Bureau clerk with the proper paperwork.
"That’s adorable," said Scroll, reading over my shoulder. "You’re trying to retract the record-keeper. That’s like trying to un-invent the word ’word.’ Go ahead. Stamp it. I’ll wait."
I stamped it.
Nothing happened. Obviously nothing happened. You cannot erase a record by asking the record to erase itself, any more than you can win an argument with your own reflection.
That was when Overseer Pao stuck his head in.
"Lin Bo," he said. "Who are you talking to?"
I froze. Scroll was sitting right there on my desk, plain as day, mid-sentence, its big grinning face glowing faintly in the lamplight.
Pao looked right at it.
Pao did not react.
"Are you," I said slowly, "are you not seeing the—"
"Seeing the what, Lin Bo." Pao’s face did the thing it does when he’s decided you’re not worth the effort. "You’re in here muttering at a pile of junk after hours. Vault duty’s gone to your head. Go home. And the bin’s not even cleared, by the way — that’s tomorrow too."
He left.
I stared at Scroll.
"Oh, that," said Scroll, waving a painted corner. "Right, I should mention. Nobody else can hear me yet. Or see this." It gestured at its own grinning face. "Not properly. Not until you’re famous enough that people will believe a man like you could have a talking scroll. It’s all belief, talent. Everything is belief. A nobody who claims he has a magic scroll is a lunatic. A legend who has a magic scroll is just having a Tuesday." The grin sharpened. "So really, the faster we make you famous, the saner you’ll look. You’re welcome."
I sat there a long moment in the empty office, holding a fired god of lies that only I could hear, with a useless stamped form in my other hand and the very strong feeling that my quiet little life had just walked out the door behind Overseer Pao and was never coming back.
"Listen to me," I said. "Very carefully. We are going to go home. We are going to go to sleep. And you are not going to post anything. About me. To anyone. Ever. Do you understand?"
Scroll’s eyes glowed warm and innocent.
"Wouldn’t dream of it," it said.
I should have known right then. A thing that gets fired from Heaven for lying does not suddenly start telling the truth because a tired clerk asked it nicely.
