The First Pages
"Page Nine. Not nine. Page Nine. Say it properly, pup, it was here before your great-great-grandmother's teeth." — Hobb of Page Nine
The Book of Doors has thousands of pages, and grows more every year. But the first twenty-three leaves are different. They were in the Book when it was found, before there was a city to write down, and every family in Quillnib's Handle can tell you whether they are First Page or not.
The Lost Twenty-Three
The founding story is told the same way by every goblin grandmother in the Handle.
Twenty-three goblins went into the Dense on a salvage run and did not come out. They walked for what felt like months, carrying each other when the weight got too much, until they made camp in a hollow and found a book lying open on a flat stone, bigger than any of them. Their scribe, a young goblin named Quillnib, was the first to touch it.
The Book had twenty-three pages. When each goblin laid a hand on one, the page filled in with a place, and the place was real. Over the next generations, the Handle was built outward from those twenty-three doors.
The descendants of the twenty-three are the First Page families. A goblin registered on one of the First Pages says the number in words: Hobb of Page Nine, Wick of Page Seven. Everyone born on a later page uses plain numbers: Grel of Page 31, Skeel of Page 212. Getting this wrong in front of an old First Page goblin is a good way to start a feud.
Rules of the First Pages
- Only Long Noses of the Rift-Sniffers may turn a First Page. Ordinary Noses handle the rest of the Book.
- The First Pages can't be repaired with Blackweight. The Book simply will not take the ink on them.
- Three First Pages are missing, their stubs cut clean in the spine. Everyone in the Handle knows which three. Nobody living knows what was on them.
The Pages
| Page | Place | Condition | What's there |
|---|---|---|---|
| One | The Cover Door | Open | The only door out of the Handle into the open Dense. Denseshifters arrive and leave here. Guarded day and night. |
| Two | The Wellhouse | Open | The Handle's spring. Its water is so heavy that a full bucket takes two goblins to lift, and the water-carriers are the strongest goblins in the city. |
| Three | The Weigh-House | Open | Where every cart and crate coming into the city is weighed and taxed. Because everything from the Dense weighs double, arguments here go on for hours. |
| Four | (missing) | Cut out | Stub only. Goblin children say it led to a god's house. |
| Five | The First Camp | Faded | The hollow where the Lost Twenty-Three found the Book. Grey and quiet. A campfire there is still warm. |
| Six | Rag Row | Open | Laundries, dyers and tanneries. The worst smell in the Handle; Rift-Sniffers hold their noses to go through. |
| Seven | The Crooked Stair | Open | Old First Page family homes on a stairway that turns back on itself. Wick of Page Seven lived here as a child. |
| Eight | The Archivist's Vault | Open | Chained books and scrolls too dangerous to read, guarded by paper constructs. |
| Nine | The Snuff Room | Open | The hall of the Rift-Sniffers, where pups are trained blindfolded. |
| Ten | The Quill Market | Open | Inks, quills and spell-bound paper, and a certain stall that gets raided. |
| Eleven | The Glimmering Shelf | Open | Floating platforms stacked like bookshelves. Swapped with the Quill Market on the Night of Wrong Pages. |
| Twelve | (missing) | Cut out | Stub only. The stub grew back for a few minutes on the Night of Wrong Pages, and something came through. |
| Thirteen | The Section That Reads You | Open | Books that write down whoever opens them. Only the very brave go in. |
| Fourteen | The Ashenburrow Door | Open | Opens into the Glimmering Ashenburrow in the City of Or, the only other tamed piece of the Dense. The Handle's main trade route to the surface. |
| Fifteen | The Inkspire Spire | Open | Calligraphers copying shifting texts into stable records. |
| Sixteen | Tallow Tower | Faded | A candle-makers' tower that collapsed long ago. The page still opens onto the room at the top, which is now three hundred feet of empty air. |
| Seventeen | The Alley of Unwritten Tales | Open | A misty alley where unfinished stories take shape around whoever walks in. |
| Eighteen | The Late Door | Open | Blank for centuries. It filled in, all at once, on the day The Rift Gate opened, and now leads to the back shelves of The Forbidden Library in Scholar's Rift. |
| Nineteen | The Long Yard | Open | The Handle's graveyard. Graves are dug one foot deep, which in the Dense is five hundred. |
| Twenty | The Street Before | Faded | A cobbled street with buildings nobody recognises, in a style no one in Iridia builds. Rift-Sniffers do not take visitors. |
| Twenty-One | The Soak | Open | A dark flooded cistern where wild Denslings drift. Protected by law, and poached by Blackweight renderers. |
| Twenty-Two | (missing) | Cut out | Stub only. The old promotion oath of the Rift-Sniffers ends: "and what we closed stays closed." |
| Twenty-Three | (blank) | Filling in | Completely white for as long as anyone remembers. In the last year, a few faint lines have started to appear. |
DM Notes: what the pages really are
Page Four, the Keep Door. It opened into Xal'Zyra's own territory in the Fractured Keep. The Lost Twenty-Three used it once, to thank the god who guided them through the Dense. The goblins who went through came back with their shadows on the wrong side. The first Rift-Sniffers cut it out after Xal'Zyra, politely, asked them to.
Page Twelve, the Hush. A deep, completely silent part of the Dense where the Longmouths breed. Sound doesn't carry there at all, which is why Longmouths hunt so well everywhere else. It was cut out after the first generation lost goblins to it. On the Night of Wrong Pages the stub grew back for a few minutes, and a young Longmouth came through into the Quill Market. Wick of Page Seven saw into the Hush before it came.
Page Twenty-Two, the Reading Room. A door into the Book itself. Anyone who steps through is read completely and becomes a page. Quillnib, the scribe, went through to understand the Book and never came out. The first Rift-Sniffers cut the page so no one would follow. Quillnib is still in the Book, and is the reason the Book has moods. Some of the grudges are his.
Page Five, the First Camp. The campfire is warm because the page doesn't show where the camp was. It shows when. Time is stuck at the evening the twenty-three found the Book. Someone who waits there long enough will see the goblins arrive.
Page Nine is fading. Hobb is hiding it. If it fades completely, the Snuff Room goes grey and every Rift-Sniffer registered to it becomes pageless, including the Chief Nose. First Pages refuse Blackweight, so the ink Hobb has been buying won't help, and he doesn't know that yet.
Page Eighteen and the Rift Gate paradox. The page filled in on the day The Rift Gate opened, and it filled in centuries before that, too; the Rift-Sniffers' old records show the date twice. It links to the same time paradox as Nokk and Tacita's lost three years.
Page Twenty, the Street Before. A street from the world before the Collapse, before Irion fell. The Book is older than Iridia.
Page Twenty-Three. The lines appearing on it are the first strokes of a map of Quillnib's Handle itself, seen from outside. When it finishes filling in, the page will open onto the entire city at once, and the Book will be able to move the whole Handle somewhere else.