Who: Mortimer & ?? What: Silvertongue accidentally starts the rift. When: The beginning. Where: From Inkworld to Fantastia Status: Open, Incomplete Rating: G
“Please?” Resa asked. Her eyes were wide and pleading. After so many years away from her it was incredibly difficult for Mortimer to deny her...
But how could she ask for such a thing? Risk losing everything all over again? With all fiber of his being and all conjuring of his understanding he couldn’t see why she would want him to read to her. So many regarded his reading as a talent or a gift. There were others like him, other “silvertongue”s with the ability to read people or things out of the written world and bring them into our reality but Mo viewed it as nothing but a curse, or a burden. Villains like Capricorn used silvertongues to manipulate reality, read out treasures, destructive creatures, he attacked their families, destroyed books, maimed and killed.
She handed him the book and curled up next to him in bed, laying her head on his chest, exactly where the scar from Mortola’s shotgun had wounded him and intertwined her legs in his. “Just once... it’s been so long....” she closed her eyes. “It’ll help me forget everything else.”
Mo sighed. He took the book she had given to him into his weary hands and allowed his eyes to graze over the title. He was familiar with this cover, familiar with the story inside, indeed the edition itself. “The Never-Ending Story” it was Meggie’s book, one of her favorites. She read it over and over as a child and she, no doubt, had packed it before leaving for the Inkworld. Now he and Resa held it in their tent, having followed Meggie there and all he wanted to do was return them home, keep them out of danger, away from the Nightmares, the Adderhead, the giants, Basta and whatever else might cause them harm. It was his fault they were here in the first place. He should have never read from “Inkheart.” And the night he’d lost Resa within it’s pages, he vowed never to read aloud again.
He couldn’t control the balance between one world to the other and by the rules of the transition, if one thing were to pass through, something had to pass in it’s place and, more often than not, it happened unintentionally. The last time Capricon had forced him to read treasure out of “Ali Baba and the Forty Theives,” he had pulled a boy from it’s pages and sent a few of his men in his place. How then, could she ask him to read? When that was how he lost her for so many years in the first place.
He’d been telling her he couldn’t for weeks now. “If not for me, Mortimer... for our son...” she whispered. “I want him to be able to hear his father’s voice.” Heaving a heavy sigh, Mo picked up the book and began to read softly but firmly his voice so beautiful graceful and calming it carried them away... The world shifted and a fearsome storm brewed outside.
[“The Never-ending Story;” Michael Ende] “Something has happened in Moldymoor,” said the will-o’-the-wisp haltingly, “something impossible to understand. Actually, it’s still happening. It’s hard to describe—the way it began was—well, in the east of our country there’s a lake—that is, there was a lake—Lake Foamingbroth we called it. Well, the way it began was like this. One day Lake Foamingbroth wasn’t there anymore—it was gone....”
“That is, the place got bigger little by little. And then all of a sudden Foggle, the father of the frogs, who lived in Lake Foamingbroth with his family, was gone too. Some of the inhabitants started running away. But little by little the same thing happened to other parts of Moldymoor. It usually started with just a little chunk, no bigger than a partridge egg. But then these chunks got bigger and bigger. If somebody put his foot into one of them by mistake, the foot—or hand—or whatever else he put in—would be gone too. It didn’t hurt—it was just that a part of whoever it was would be missing. Some would even fall in on purpose if they got too close to the Nothing. It has an irresistible attraction—the bigger the place, the stronger the pull. None of us could imagine what this terrible thing might be, what caused it, and what we could do about it...It didn’t go away by itself but kept spreading...”