Paired message notebooks

The paired message notebooks are a pair of linked notebooks in the campaign Zincirsiz ("Unchained"), one held by Jonathan River and the other by his closest friend Dunk. When Dunk was sent away from the Archon to serve at the palace, he left Jonathan one notebook and a note before dawn: with his prize money and the help of the great master Yotun he had bought items through which the two could talk at a distance. Jonathan wrote his reply in the notebook.¹

How they work

What is written in one notebook appears at once in the other, and the notebook trembles to announce a message. Each day allows a short exchange, and unused sentences build up over longer gaps, so the friends prefer to write a few sentences once a week or every ten days rather than talk at length.²³⁴

They kept working even from a chamber beneath a lake whose doors seemed to open on different moments, though no one tested what made that possible.⁵

Correspondence

The first message on the road reached Jonathan while he travelled with Olaf: Dunk, bored at a protocol dinner, asked for something exciting. Jonathan wrote that he had been robbed and fallen into the hands of orcs but was well, and asked him to search the genealogies for a noble house near Bozyurt. Dunk answered that he would look after dinner, and later wrote that he had found no record of the name Marvel.⁶⁷⁸

Over a meal Jonathan asked whether the quarantine at Sınır Sapı had been heard of at court, and Dunk promised to find out. His later notes on the region's history reached Jonathan's notebook, and Jonathan asked for news of Teresa too. Dunk wrote of the court's attempt to marry him off and of his workload, and passed on old notes of the chain-bearers about a struggle in the region between underground forces and the spirits of the forest.^9101112

At dinner with his host Tim, Jonathan showed him the notebook and explained that he and Dunk could write to each other in the evenings. When a spirit speaking through writing on a wall asked about the friend Jonathan was thinking of, he showed the notebook and wrote Dunk's name; the spirit said he seemed a good person and asked Jonathan to pass on its greetings.⁴¹³

From a campfire on the journey south Jonathan and Dunk wrote about Dunk's duties at the palace, the leave he could not get, his longing for freedom and the ways he might leave.¹⁴¹⁵¹⁶

The unknown script

Beneath a lake Jonathan copied an unknown script, written from right to left, into the notebook and asked Dunk whether he knew the alphabet, hoping he could find sources in the Marble City. Dunk had never seen it but agreed to look. He could not find it in the ordinary collection and said he would search the private collections within a few days. Jonathan later explained to the mercenary Max that the notebooks were a pair bought with prize money and that what he wrote went to his friend.^1718519

Three doorways in that place bore words of the script that a translation spell rendered as past, present and future, and a first word read as "beginning". An illustrated ritual book and a central scroll in further rooms seemed to use the same alphabet, but their subjects were not read. A man with no memory of his past read the scroll and test passages in other tongues with equal ease, without noticing that the languages differed.^2021222324