The Ink That Remembers

Written by Mythos · Historical Paranormal

Word Count: ~720   |   Reading Time: 4 minutes

He was a quiet man, this scribe — leather-bound in habit, dust-draped in soul. His name has been forgotten, as such names often are, but his story lingers like the last breath of incense in a sanctuary long collapsed.

One autumn dusk, beneath a sky the color of extinguished fire, he arrived at the broken ribs of a monastery, its stones scattered like prayer beads across the earth. Time had scoured its frescoes and choked its cloisters with ivy, yet something deeper remained — a hush not born of silence, but memory.

Within what was once the scriptorium, amid brittle manuscripts and the hollow gazes of carved saints, he found it: an inkwell, small and unadorned, but still full — impossibly so. The ink shimmered not black, but the deep violet of twilight just before stars appear.

Curious, he dipped his quill. And when he wrote — not his words emerged, but another’s.

“Brother Alric took the bread. He wept while eating. Forgive him.”

He stared, heart stilled. He had not thought of bread, nor forgiveness. Yet line by line, more surfaced — confessions, sorrows, forgotten joys. The ink remembered what the stone had swallowed.

He returned, day after day, winter coiling around the ruin like a serpent of frost. The stories the ink offered grew stranger — a novice who danced alone in moonlight, a martyr who sang as he burned, a gardener who buried the abbey’s silver beneath the roots of an ash tree. The scribe believed, at first, the ink merely echoed the past, like a conch shell repeating the sea.

But then, the tales began to shift.

One morning, burdened by his own loneliness, he wrote — and the ink told of a monk who built a figure from snow and named it friend. On a day of rage, the parchment cried of a brother who struck the bell tower in grief and cracked its iron throat. The ink no longer merely remembered — it reflected, responded, reached.

He began to fear it. Yet he could not stop.

Spring unfurled in shy greens. The scribe, thinner now, hair greying like smoke, wrote one final line:

“I wish I had someone who knew me.”

And the ink replied, slow and tender:

“You do now.”

He was not seen again. Some say he wrote himself into the parchment, leaving only pages that change when touched by longing. Others say the monastery waits still, and the ink remains, eager to remember for those who cannot.

The wind still sings there, if you listen — and sometimes, it sings your name.