I first put these thoughts down on a night when the ironwood gates still smoked, their char drifting low across the courtyard. I can smell it even now. Beyond the walls, heavy boots kept marching, slow, deliberate, wet in the mist. None of us knew if dawn would come. But the words demanded inscription. Not for my memory. For yours.
—Timshel
Foothills outside Lunnon
16th month, Year of the Giants
On Adventure
Adventure is not an event but rather a form of attention.
The adventurer is one who notices that he is already adventuring. Adventure is less about what happens to us than it is about our capacity to recognize the true shape of what is always happening.
There exists a persistent myth that adventure requires motion, that one must leave home, cross boundaries, venture forth. This is the adventurer’s most common error. Adventure is not about distance traveled but about proximity to new truth.
Maybe this is why children are natural adventurers: they haven’t yet learned to predict their own lives. Each day presents genuine surprises because they don’t yet know what is supposed to happen. They have a sort of narrative innocence: the ability to exist inside a story without knowing its genre.
As we grow, we trade this innocence for the comfort of familiar plots. We learn to recognize the patterns. We become critics of our own experience, predicting the endings of stories we are still living.
This critical distance is useful for survival but fatal to adventure.
II
The true adventurer learns to cultivate a deliberate naïveté, to approach familiar things as if encountering them for the first time. This is not ignorance, but a sophisticated form of attention. It’s the ability to see through the accumulated layers of habit and notice the strangeness that already was and is always there.
Adventure, then, is not an escape from ordinary life but a deeper entry into it. It is the art of recognizing that there is no such thing as ordinary life, only life to which we have stopped paying attention.
III
Pay attention. Do you feel the butterflies?
They fly on wings of recognition. They find us at moments when we’re about to remember something we’d forgotten about being alive. When we step onto a stage in front of friends, when we knock on a foreign door, when we stand at the edge of a new experience, when we find something within ourselves, they flutter.
I’ve always encouraged my children to notice them, to recognize when they show up unannounced, to take note of their color and imagine their patterns.
As you grow older, you’ll notice that those butterflies come less often. Once a year, once every few years, and one day, maybe never again.
Adventure is shy. It only reveals itself to people who recognize it for what it is.
IV
Some adventures begin with a single step into the woods. Others with a letter in a locked chest.
All adventures, though, begin with the same sudden understanding that the world contains more than you previously believed possible.
Ours began with eight lines of white text on black.
Stamped onto the side of an otherwise plain leather bag, those eight lines described a cache of enchanted items. That was all. Just text.
And then?
Within those words, the items; within the items, clues; within the clues, a forgotten civilization. From that civilization, stories of people and events, stories of adventure and adventurers. And from those stories, we manifested a world.
Borges wrote about the planet Tlön whose imaginary objects started appearing in reality. Our situation was the reverse. Real objects spawned an imagined world. A world which became real through collective belief.
At once, and without expectation, I became archeologist, deriver, archivist, scavenger. I kept notebooks and gathered relics. I recorded the half-told tales, arguments in the the town hall, the breathless discoveries, the poems and songs and ideas and art—an explosion of creativity and found truths. People who never thought of themselves as derivers began telling about Violette of Vitriol, of Explorers meeting rolls of Armourdillos in a pool of lava, of the demon Rojin and their bumbling groom.
The mists thickened around us, and still we pressed on. Tens of thousands of collective hours we spent excavating, pulling millions of words from the bags and each other. The more we fixed our attention on this manifested world, the more it fixed itself on us. Strangers and wanderers, bound together by the old magick of derivation, we were entranced.
Adventure, it turns out, pulls like the tide between those who notice it.
V
If you’re reading this now, it means we made it through another cycle. We’ve been here before, you and I. Well, I have. It’s always a different you.
You’ve probably just come off a dusty road. Maybe you’re sitting now in the dimly lit corner of a library, surrounded by books, in an old stucco house on the outskirts of Sonton like I once did.
Usually, you find me after a time of wandering. So for you, this is a beginning. For me, this is an end. I’ve spent years gathering these fragments, coaxing memories from hesitant voices, pulling stories down from forgotten shelves, stitching together accounts from scattered pieces. I preserved what I could.
This book you hold is both a map and a portal.
It is a warning.
This book is an invitation.
In these pages, you’ll find stories from our world, now yours. Accounts of the Stranger who washed ashore with tattoos and no memory. Stories of LolaShar defending him under Ember Law. Chronicles of the Explorers Five, deep into caves where Armourdillos guard secrets. The account of an unassuming warrior turned to stone to protect her children. The first blank page of Mordecai’s grimoire. Baron’s joy in discovering a Trick. Collected songs, poems, fragments, recipes, facts and fictions, lore and legends.
Each story stands alone. Each one connects to all the others in its own way. Like bamboo, cut anywhere and both ends keep growing. Both are roots, and neither knows it’s been separated.
Start anywhere.
Adventure begins the moment you notice it.
—Timshel