Chip

Among clans far gone and people long past, strangers shed and donned faces with an abandon near reckless formed from tradition just as ageless. Every teller and performer held in reserve a carved visage, a persona for the crowd, the second side of a coin from whom verses spilled forth to entrance the people. Like palimpsests of spoken word, who each one represented overwritten and remade with every poem told and re-told and composed on the spot. Whether painted bright or dark, sculpted grand or small, it didn't matter, not really. In these snatched moments, any mask such a poet bore could come to brilliant life.

One mask, tethered carefully to the belt of a creature whose wings wound around the winds, did so many, many times. In lands learned and shadowed, bright and dusty, verdant and freezing, sparkling and sparking — where life could be, thus did its speaker go. And the mask witnessed and heard many things on these borrowed wings, both beautiful and grim but so very real, and if it were alive it might have said without doubt that it loved them.

But life all eventually began to waver. And so the mask's bearer found a place in the fresh breezes from whence they came, among tall thin bamboo stalks and lay the mask down among parchment and tools, where it waited patiently until wrinkled hands passed it on to smaller, smoother digits. Then away it went again, across the yard and beyond, until its bearer grew tired once more.

For a time the cycle held; the mask went, a companion to carefully crafted word, and returned to rest until curious hands took it up.

But as the years drifted on, fewer and fewer people borrowed the mask to don. The hours spent waiting on shelf or belt or bag stretched, like spiral tails and fresh-spun taffy, a whirl of silence enduring. Finally, one day, its bearer took the mask to bright fresh halls, filled with old verses and tomes, shelves as high as any cliff and stalk, where they lay it among inked pages. And there the mask remained, as silent as the day it had been made.



It did not stir from its resting place. Not as ages rose and fell, as the library fell into new claws and the dusty corners remained mostly undisturbed, save to clear them of dust. Outside, the world swirled and changed in time with magic's ebb and flow. Battles raged. Peace reigned. The mask was not alive, had never been alive, not really— but it was not immune to spells formed by the land around it. It seeped into its weave and wood, became one with its make. The mask did not quite come to life, but it could no longer stand the silence. It longed for those below.

Filled as it was with poems and songs, the mask whispered into still air the way its bearers did, so long ago. It spun ephemeral stars out of spat embers and gnarled hands out of twisted branches, for flowered words and side-stepped descriptions were all it knew of bonfires and trees; and when it ran out it started over from the beginning, for a mask alone could not form new lines of its own. Without breath to run out, it would speak until the days ran out altogether.

Until, one day...

Claws clitter-clacked on the wooden floorboards,
Wary of fallen pages.

The mask did not stop.

Three dragons approached, small and tall and all curious
accompanied by the ruffle
of parchment chronicles and bright stanzas,
Many old, few new.

The mask did not stop.

A spirit of the sky, a tug of magic,
It's perch rattled and shaken
Until it fell to the waiting gentle hands
Of these strangers.

And the mask, attuned suddenly to an audience, paused.




The mask did not know who they were. The mask was not alive enough to ask. But it knew what a presence meant, what the broken stillness could mean, and it hoped, it hoped, it hoped.

Won't you let me hear the words,
Just one last time? Just one more time.

Clutched close, it whispered its borrowed poems, what versed pleas it could. And the three dragons smiled and marvelled as inspiration unspooled to fill the air, a promise of ink-dipped pens and eager sharing. An idea grew in their minds, entirely their own making as they lobbied idea after idea, and when they left that day, it wasn't empty handed.

"This mask seems to be our lucky charm! We should share it!"



Sunlight glitters in a world long since changed. The zephyrs of the land the mask's first maker-speaker-poet called home swirl anew now, altered though alike. It whistles through the mask's carved fletches and hollow eyes, leaving it swaying in the breezes. Those who found it have donned their own masks as the magic which so saturates the world intensifies with the seasons, leaving kites and strings spiralling without care. Poets young and old come by, smiling, eager, and share their crafts with each other and the wind.

It isn't what it used to be, but it rings true and tried with tradition. Sheafs passed, lines read out, bright in daytime air. And the mask does not whisper, for the verses it loves have reached it again at last, and it fills itself with these new words gladly. Through it, the mask learns the world once more, good and bad and all in-between— and perhaps now, it can say it loves them.