You feel me. This is the kind of stuff I lie awake at night thinking about.
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Something I noticed…
Ages like The Late Bronze Age, The Dark Ages, and The Middle Ages are always named after the fact, from a historical point of view, but The Book of Briars told us that ages like The Book of The Wild and The Book of Kings are named in “magimystic parlance” and from what we know are at least sometimes named while the age is still occurring.
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Almost as if someone is further ahead in the book then us
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Soo…for some reason I had never considered deeply before now that some people wouldn’t exist in one book or the other. I guess I just sort of assumed that it was events and objects, not people themselves, that were removed or replaced. I’ve wondered so many times what I might have been like in the Book of the Wild, but I never even bothered to consider that I might not exist there, and that is…not a comforting thought.
But more over…I’m curious what might cause people to be erased, or “written-in,” as it were. If the center of the Book of Kings edit was the Briar Books, and then magiq also “for want of a nail,” so to speak, how many other things are different in the final rewrite, and why?
Are there some people who, without the influence of some magiqal cirumstance would genuinely not exist? If people have been added (which is harder to tell, because you could presumably have existed in the BotW without remembering the Briar Books here), why? Are they replacements of some sort? Ways of filling in gaps left by magiq, or by something else that went missing because of magiq? Or maybe the “edit” only erased people, so we’re missing people from the BotW, but haven’t added any that weren’t there before? I dunno. This is all super weird.
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My magimystic life in a nutshell.
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This comes back to my question of how the edit would be accomplished. But in practical terms they’re kinda similar.
If magiq was “find and replaced with non-magiq” then say my mother, who loves books arguably more than breathing would no doubt have been a serious illomancer in the Book of the Wild. I’m sure she had some wonderful adventures through all sorts of tomes.
In the Book of Kings, with no magiq, she was bored, decided to start talking to some guy she bumped into, decided to get hitched and have a couple kids. Book of Kings → Robert Book of Wild → No Robert. That’s a simple example anyway.
On the other hand let’s say I had a terminal disease as a child, and in the Book of the Wild a noted practitioner managed to cure me. In the Book of Kings, however, that practitioner was edited out of the world, and so all their actions would be too. Modern science didn’t have a clue and hence Book of Kings → No Robert (and no Robert’s kids…which disturbs me.), but Book of Wild Robert (and his kids, and their kids maybe…don’t pressure them they’re 5 and 3.)
I’m sure I’m over simplifying this, but it’s all my little mind can handle right now.
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Not gonna lie, it’s been two weeks since this post and I’m still haunted trying to figure out what happens to all these missing people.
I guess my understanding of time has basically been that there’s several layers of choices, a different timeline for every possible outcome. So like, there’s a timeline where I found the Mountaineers, there’s another timeline where I didn’t, and maybe a timeline where instead of browsing the forums I got hit by a bus. I dunno, stuff like that. Except it’s for every little choice, of every person.
But the find and replace kind of changes…that means there’s a singular timeline that keeps getting altered over and over again? That’s really hard for me to comprehend. And even moreso, how do we keep a history of events if that is the case? How can we track things if they’re constantly being overwritten? We often talk about the Book of Kings and Book of the Wild, as they’re the most recent ages. But what does it mean to talk about The Book of the Dark or the Book of the Hidden? How do we know what happened in those times? The only reason we know about the Book of the Wild is because the editor goofed and didn’t get to everything. Does that mean previous editors did the same thing to these other ages? Are there other fragments waiting to be found from, say, the Book of the Hidden?
I’m not gonna lie, I’m one of those readers who hates when things are retconned, unless it’s for an exceptionally good reason. The thought of actual history being, well, basically perpetually retconned actually makes me a bit nauseous. I’ll be here, in the corner, weeping and mumbling about wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff. 
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Spirit is here to tell you a story!
So there once was an age or period of time in our existence that magiq people called The Book of The Wild:
There was a seemingly large magic culture there, though hidden from most (Those Who Did Not Die lived there, as well as Avis Green, and presumably most of us in some altered fashion), and the guilds existed there, and a pocket world called Neithernor was created there by exploring some other place called The Fray (I’ll come back to that.)
Then something happened.
The entire age/book was rewritten. We don’t know why. We don’t know by whom.
The rewriting consisted of—
- Removing most knowledge of a series of books called The Lost Collection (which we now know include Ackerly Green’s Guide to Magiq and a children’s book called The Little Red House.)
- Erasing most memory/knowledge/use of magic.
- Events, people, and places were also changed to erase the above, though we don’t know if there was some single event that caused all of this or multiple alterations to accomplish the above.
The new rewritten age was called The Book of Kings.
The Book of Kings is the age/world/place we live in now. Mostly bereft of magic, but there are people and places still connected to the old age. According to bird-people sources, it’s kind of like rewriting a massive book. You’re not going to catch absolutely every little nuance of the previous book. It’s been likened to the plot being altered to remove a major element, but some of the themes that were interwoven remain.
Also, a place called Neithernor is connected to, but not part of The Book of The Wild/Kings and was unaffected by the changes. I like to think of it like a bookmark that got left in.
What little remains of magic here in The Book of Kings has been either mostly used up, or hoarded away by the Silver.
The events in The Monarch Papers helped bring about the end of The Book of Kings and as far as we know we’re about to start a new age called The Book of Briars.
We don’t know what came before The Book of The Wild/Kings, or how long these “ages” last. We don’t know if they’re like The Bronze Age long, or Recorded History long.
In my hypothesis, the collected ages represent not only our history but our world/dimension. Yes, I just wrote dimension.
Because we know of two places that exist outside of our “dimension” or “collected works.” Neithernor, and the Fray, the former being a piece of the latter according to Mr. Wideawake. The Fray is where The Council of the 18 Gates preside. It’s where King Rabbit came from. It’s where Traveler went when he tried to escape The Book of Kings.
To get my head around it, I like to think of the Fray as the bookstore within which the Book ages exist. Some outer dimension/space that encircles or bumps against ours. We know the Fray is an actual concept/space because a piece of it became Neithernor, but…
What we don’t know—
- Are there other book series in this bookstore, just sitting on other shelves?
- Is the Fray the place all books exist, or is the Fray just a place near us? Are we in the Fray or just near it? Are we in the bookshop or sitting on a sidewalk for sale rack just outside the shop?
I just realized I didn’t answer anything. But it has got me thinking about our world/dimension as a “series” and how we then exist within whatever else is out there.
Also. What else is out there? Is the Fray the “everything else” or just another piece? Another series?
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If we all exist in the Books, and were subject to editing, then we are characters in these Books; then are we simultaneously also in the Fray (reading the books about ourselves)? How does this translate, then, to King Rabbit inserting himself into the Book of Kings from the Fray, and the Last Traveler escaping from the Book of Kings to The Fray? Did the reader become the character and vice-versa?
Is the Fray even something “outside” of the Books, or contained, part-and-parcel within the overaching book, like an Appendix, that was not edited to make the Book of Kings out of the Book of the Wild? I don’t know that we can know this with the information that we have on hand, from some questionable sources.
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Writing friends into and out of fanfiction.
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I would venture to say it isn’t quite as meta as we’re in the Fray reading the books. If we ignore the “Book of–” metaphor and treat them like periods of time in our existence/world/dimension, then the Fray could be space, or another dimension.
I’ve had the same issue where I keep trying to apply all things to the book metaphor and getting more and more confused, ala editing a book equaling alteration of history.
Basically:
Our time/dimension was altered.
Neithernor wasn’t altered because it’s outside our /time/dimension.
It’s from the Fray, which exists outside/alongside our time/dimension.
Through the actions taken in The Monarch Papers events, we’ve brought about a period of time that will be new, but will also be a “story” containing elements of The Book of The Wild and The Book of Kings (two worlds rebound.)
I think.
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Talking about jumping in and out of books reminds me of Myst.
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Don’t forget, we do have some scant information about previous Books/Ages, from the Book of Briars (the thing, not the age) itself:
- Inlaudetus - the “Obscured Age” or “The Book of the Hidden”
- Obscuriotempus - the “Shadow Age” or “The Book of the Dark”
- Gnascorius- “The Dawning Age” or “The Book of Light”
I don’t know how this helps, but there it is.
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I love the little pictures you put along side this!
EDIT: Also this is now giving me massive Jumanji/Inkheart flash backs and I don’t like 
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