Draftbook of Glass
The Works of Anomander Peel
The Basic Concept
Anomander Peel, the titular character, is an artist. A poet, a writer, a man with a magic pen - and he is not a nice man in the least. Changed by some strange event lost to the mists of time he now makes jumps and hops throughout the universe both in space and time, recreating his stories…or perhaps inspiring them with reality. His pen can change and morph flesh, and alter reality when deployed.
These works are the stories he creates…or is it recreates? And those who suffer under his changes to the world.
The setting
The universe is vast and wide and Anomander can appear essentially anywhere. From Earth in various time periods to the Wanderer's Library itself, he can and has traipsed through the veil to make his changes and his stories.
Current ideas are modern day earth, the library itself, and various strange places throughout the universe. This can be added to as it goes - may involve Anomander's workshop should a story ever focus in on him.
Potential Characters
Anomander Peel - the Artist himself, a terrible creature. Tall, dressed formally, with a face of absolute calm and twisted cold - blue eyes full of complete inhumanity. Once a human being, he is now far different
The Lover - Anomander's first creation, an unfortunate young man who fell for the artist when he was still a human being - and regretted it ever since. He is twisted into a hunched, hulking thing with terrible spikes of iron driven through his flesh and a permanent mask of black iron stapled into milk pale skin.
Byron Hail - An older man born under Jupiter's eye in the mid 19th century, he is unfortunate enough to encounter Peel's work…and to have the moral standing to want to do something about it.
Tabitha - A young woman from the tiny Hamlet Byron calls home, she has a striking interest in Astronomy and the stars. Most unfortunate indeed, for it leads her right into the awful path of the artist.
More to be added as time goes on
The outline
The first story; My Only Lover
The Second story; Why do you do this to me?
The Third Story: Jump
The Stories
My Only Lover
Once there was a man I knew
Wide of eye - blue, their hue
He sat often at the foot of my bed
Wondering
Something wrong I knew with horror
A solution I found without dither
My pen I took to fix him
Slavering
From deep in vein came blackest night
Twisting into vine, giving fruit
The man shook and shivered
Screaming
From my chamber then he went
Teeth a-chattering, blood flowing
I followed ever closer
Cackling
Into night and darkness went
My lovely man at foot of bed
No longer eyes of blue,
Bleeding
Pen had wrought and ruin been brought
Ink to paper, blood to words
Clawing eyes with newfound gifts
Watching
Now my lovely walks alone
Through streets of sleeping hearts
Ever searching in the dark
Hating
He cannot see to wonder
He hungers but can only slaver
He cannot speak to scream
He dreams only of my cackling
He bears wounds that always bleed
He has only a ruined heart to watch
His hate is food for my gristle mill, the pen ever writing on.
Sablebrook Hamlet was an isolated thing under the lee of a cliff and by the , and it was quiet even for that kind of remote location. A cluster of ten houses around a road that saw a car or two a month come speeding through never to look back, by the eponymous brook with its shale bed and black-if-you-look-right water, nothing ever happened there. The families would know, and tell each other, and then the world would never hear about it.
It had been a sanctuary from the world for many, every couple of years a house was made empty by people deciding they’d had enough of silence or too much of their neighbours and off they went back to lives no one really asked about but all gossiped together to figure out. Then, after it had sat cold and quiet for a winter or two some newcomer came into the tiny place and settled themselves like a bird to nest for a few summers.
By Byron’s count the only person who had stayed nearly as long as him had made it twenty years. He was on his sixtieth - born one dreadful October in the little house farthest from the road, the one with the oldest bones. Few wanted to compete with the man who had no life outside to run away from, or to go back to so none had ever claimed they wanted to beat that record themselves. For the rest he had become a monument of sorts, a walking gnarled oak who came to dispense wisdom and fix damaged roof tiles…or the wi-fi, when that started playing up.
So when he woke up in the darkness of his sixtieth birthday’s morning, he knew something was wrong. His bones were set wrong, his bed uncomfortable, and the room he had slept in his whole life was as warm as it would’ve been at the height of summer.
Swinging complaining legs from bed and seizing his cane - more out of the comfort of having a solid length of reinforced wood in hand than to support him - he pushed himself up onto steady feet and went stalking through a silent house. Modern things beeped and glowed, shadows cast by a full moon standing black stark even through the thin curtains, and Byron couldn’t find the source of his unease no matter how he looked. Oppressive heat hadn’t yet released skin gone clammy or a beating pulse at his throat.
The kitchen was as he left it, clean and organised. Couches and an armchair loomed in the front room, bulbous in the dark, daring him to come trip over their upholstery and sturdy frames. Finally he settled the cane’s tip onto the wooden floor, leaning until he heard it creak, and began to make his way to the front of the home, frowning at himself and the world all around.
Silence was the usual state of affairs for this late in the evening, a blanket of soundlessness that covered the whole hamlet. Byron almost winced at the snick of the lock and the creaking of hinges as he pushed his front door open to look out on the world. Nothing but quiet, dark houses under a full moon and the gentle drifting of woodsmoke from the Bentley place. They’d left their stove on through the night again, and with the chill creeping up the old man’s pyjama trousers he couldn’t blame them. Still, leading with his cane, he stepped out onto his garden path to take a quick look around. With the cold night air wrapping around him, the strange heat was at least finally gone.
He might’ve sighed in relief if the cold light wasn’t trying to seep into his skin. There was something brighter hanging over it, gleaming in the dark between stars and over sky. A star, maybe, that stood out large against the black. For some reason looking at it made that terrible warmth come back in force and this time it was as thought it was closing in hard on him, tightly gripping at his flesh and mind - so when a high, eager voice rang out from a garden away he was glad for it rather than startled.
“Mister Hail!” One of the newer families had a kid - and Byron couldn’t remember her name. She was sitting behind the safety of a fence nearly as old as he was beside a great