If It Ain't On The Page [FICTOID]

Every time a queen of the Uchaphate people died, the famous literary monks of Euneni would come down from their icy mountain, take charge of the royal corps, and with great pomp and circumstance, with the clanging of many gongs and the sounding of many trumpets, carry her back to their monastery.

Once inside with the great iron-and-oak doors bolted shut, an elaborate 33-day ritual would begin.  The queen would be undressed and prepared, skilled flensers of the brotherhood carefully peeling off her skin to stretch and preserve it.

The rest of he remains would be quickly cremated, the ashes scattered to the winds to be blown over the Uchaphate homeland.

On the final day of the ritual the true work would begin.  The queen’s preserved skin would make thirty to forty sheets of human parchment for the monks to use.

These would be prepared to eventually be sewn into The Great Work, a book the Euneni worked on for nearly a millennia now.  Ever since the first queen of the Uchaphate people saw a prophetic vision about a thousand years earlier, the order of literary monks would wait patiently in quiet supplication for the skin of the latest queen ins order to continue their story.

For it was a story, not a history, not a religious text.  It provided a cultural touchstone for the Uchaphate people, a common heritage they could draw on, an ideal for a future they could strive for.

The monks took their task quite seriously and with great responsibility; the fate of the entire Uchaphate nation rested inn their hands.

“Where shall our story go, brothers?” asked the eldest of the literary monks.  “When we last left our hero, he stood atop a waterfall stalked by an albino tiger.”

“What did the previous generation of monks suggest?” asked the youngest supplicant in the group.  This queen proved particularly long lived, outlasting the previous literary monks who composed on pages made from the previous queen .

“They left no notes,” said the eldest monk.  “At least none that made sense.”

“That implies they did leave something,” said the youngest member.  “Out with it!  What did they say?”

“They took a vow of silence after they finished writing their portion of The Great Work,” said the eldest monk, “choosing to either bite their own tongues off or hurl themselves from the highest parapet of our monastery to ensure they never violated it.  They burned their notes, leaving but a single enigmatic line behind:  ‘…yearning soon corrodes, leaving only a sense of what could have been…’”

Much debate raged among the assembled monks over the meaning of this phrase.  In the end they interpreted it as meaning the hero should jump off the waterfall to the pool below.

Once the rough draft of the chapter was written on papyrus, the monks handed it over to specialist scribes to render as a gorgeously illuminated manuscript on the human parchment.  When the scribes completed their task, those pages were sewn into The Great Work and became part of the never ending lore that made up the psychological profile of the Uchaphate people.  Even though it remained a work of fiction, it still provided the heart and soul of the Uchaphate culture.

Later, they burned the youngest monk at the stake for suggesting they issue a paperback edition.

© Buzz Dixon