The Beast Fears Fire - Codices

Codex [Ignorance 2]
Impulse - To Bring Forth Forgetting

I have some bad news for you. Thanks to my writing down things about the Other in this bestiary, there will be a time when it becomes a codex and attempts to kill you or those who receive this book as a bequest. I apologize in advance.

The Other likes to keep its secrets, which is why liminal merrow might drown you between the walls for reading this, or a lobsterman might appear in your wardrobe one morning while you are dressing. In writing this, I have killed some of you, and I am sorry. The Other will eventually notice the copies of this book, one by one, and infect them. There's no stopping it. It will grow, burst the shelves of it's book case, the pages and cover will darken. Codices grow to be the size of the largest books made, a meter across, end to end, when open. They levitate on their own, in lazy loops and spirals. They will lay eggs, clear, teal jelly, the size of songbird eggs, in clumps. Inside, you will see tiny books starting to develop. More codices.

Codices are very aggressive toward any being that is literate, which, in Crickton (thanks to the Murrenic school system), is almost everyone. Their slow and apparently whimsical flight patterns sometimes conceal it, but when they start slicing up minds with extruded words, their intentions become pretty easy to read.

Harm 3, Forgetting. It can be hard to see the words stretching out from the pages in a dark place, but you can feel them, and more importantly, you can, even without seeing them, read them. If you cannot read, you're fairly safe from these beings; they might batter you with their covers, but they don't really have the force to harm you. If you can read, they will make you read, and if you do not make yourself understand the word you read, it will hurt you, mind and brain. This isn't a matter of vocabulary, the words a codex will tell you are from the language of the Other, and they do not place nice with native minds. A person killed by a codex usually has soup in their skull where their brain used to be.

But Don't Take My Word For it
When a codex tries to make you read it's Otherwords, face Ignorance.
On a Hit, you understand well enough to avoid the Harm it causes.
On a Hard Hit, you infect the codex with your language, causing Great Harm to it.
On a Miss, your mind rebels against the word. Suffer Harm as stated and choose one piece of information that you utterly forget. If it is interesting, the Moderator might let you Refresh Strength.

Take a Look, it's in a Book
Codex eggs can take a while to hatch, but there is a method (the Sondowey Technique, developed here in Crickton!) to controlling when they will, which makes them one malicious deposit away from being really good assassins. Fragments of a destroyed codex can be rebound, such that they do not fly around or lay eggs, but reading the text causes the same attack that an active codex would level.

There are rumors that someone tried teaching young children to read the language of the Other instead of the languages of the Sea. The rumors don't cover what came of this, but I am not holding out hope that it went anywhere at all well.