My Waystone: or, Echoes in Three Parts

The Waystone was his, just as the third silence was his. This was appropriate, as it was the greatest silence of the three, wrapping the others inside itself. It was deep and wide as autumn’s ending. It was heavy as a great river-smooth stone. It was the patient, cut-flower sound of a man who is waiting to die.

                             Patrick Rothfuss, prologue to The Name of the Wind                                             

This is the book that forever altered my creative brain, the author who showed me what words can do. My thoughts hum as they speak to me, out from the depths of my subconscious.

It was a silence of three parts.

I answer each with an echo.

***

1.

Do not confuse magic for supernatural power. It is earthen laws, secrets behind the true world; perhaps the truth of that truth. It is mysteries and fatality, pain to show beauty, eyes that take control. It is human and fae and the gateway between.

Magic is an act of disciplining the mind. It is the division of the conscious brain into two, four, even seven parts, holding conflicting beliefs about reality such that you alter its fabric.

Rothfuss has convinced me this is possible. I can bind energies, split my mind, and perform acts of unimaginable power. Magic is not a substance, but a physical law harnessed by our bodies, minds, and spirits. To believe an object will hover in the air is to know that it won’t. Both are true, and the strength of this contradiction determines its manifestation.

Kvothe wants to learn the name of the wind, for everything has a name [true name]. To know it is to control it, and enter into the realms of Fae seductresses and shadow cloaks.

Legends of great sorcerers calling the wind were enticing from childhood, and this is Kvothe’s ultimate goal. In addition to his vengeance quest, we will eventually see him embody the legend of Taborlin the Great, and use the wind, the lightning, the earth itself to defeat the villains of shadow and blue flame.

My spirit is fascinated by the wind, the very air. Consider it my muse, perhaps the cornerstone of my emotional center as a writer. It is life, of course. [A phase? I do not think so.] For Kvothe to strive towards conquering it is like seeing a man desire to control the essence of existence.

[Welcome, you, to the core of this beloved character’s being.]

My mind whilst writing is often split, my emotional self plunged into the Heart of Stone for focus, bound to the alacrity of my fingertips. As language carves out a tiny reality in the immaterial, I am calling it by Name [secret name].

2.

Auri. The spirit of the University, gentle rabbit of the Underthing. Giver of key, coin, candle and loving teacher to Kvothe on small and true things. It was a slow regard, but burns with a copper bond.

The timid creature is of the moon, and her name was given by Kvothe himself. She is his wounded child-heart made manifest, and oh, so delicate. Secret, ethereal genius.

Hers is the silence which is real, the silence of the forgotten, hidden beauty of the world, that hides in the night but answers truth with secrets and love. Auri is what we strive to be. Many do not recognize it within themselves and I weep for them. To ignore this spirit of light is to sentence her to directness of speech rather than slant—and she is not bilingual.

Writing is that which the immaterial makes tangible. I have learned to see the world in poetry, to feel strings of connections where nothing is visible. The refractions of reality are where Auri lives, those slight imbalances that give one pause. Where is it, really? Is there magic, just out of step with my foot’s pressure? If truth is a tunnel of morphing connections, a mental unraveling of sideways glances at the world around us, I want to find it.

Auri is the nymph of my pen. How I long to know her, face to face.

A tilted glance will have to be enough.

3.

The third silence engulfs the others, for it is that which sits in the shaed of his power. Music in words. To hear the lute in a book — one might say it is impossible. I tell you, it is not.

To be swept up in Rothfuss’ world is nearing falsehood. I have been swallowed by it, my mind imbued with its verse. In quiet moments, the countryside of pages flits across my internal eye, and suddenly I stand in the forest where Kvothe composes his mourning songs, the square where he insults an influential peer, improvising crass lyrics to a toxic crowd…The pond beside which Denna plays her first composition…

Audience holds breath while Kvote plays for his pipes. He shines on the stage and wins over wary strangers. Denna meets him in song, their courtship sealed in a chance encounter. It is this moment, one of so many, that is the most joyous, for I do not actually know its melody. Yet, it is there, plucking away in the fibers of my memory.

His father sings that fatal song around the fire, his mother harmonizing—I sit with the troupe, I drink their water, their wine. I weep at the sound.

I hear Kvothe’s fingers remember old songs on top of a waystone, playing true songs [true names] for the leaves, the brook, the rabbit in the brush.

I can hear him playing in the pub for his rent.

When he plays for Auri, I am as still as the wind. For even it knows that for this, it must hold...

It is a hard line that music must be heard, yet Rothfuss has redefined my Mo’s scale; I’ve softened, most likely into a puddle. Music is immaterial, and that means even with regard to sound waves. We need them here; but not there.

A silent performance. Yet it resounds with great force and swell…

[It echoes.]

***

Plot is elusive in the typical sense. It is grand, mythic, tragic, yet uncertainly so. It is a story enfolded in another, a fictional autobiography taken by a legendary scribe. Kvothe is a fledgling hero, endearing, clever, and wounded. He seeks truth. Power. Vengeance.

My name is Kvothe, pronounced nearly the same as "quothe..."

I have stolen princesses back from sleeping barrow kings. I burned down the town of Trebon. I have spent the night with Felurian and left with both my sanity and my life. I was expelled from the University at a younger age than most people are allowed in. I tread paths by moonlight that others fear to speak of during day. I have talked to Gods, loved women, and written songs that make the minstrels weep.

You may have heard of me.

Kvothe (Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind)

This book is my waystone. The gateway.

A mind once unlocked cannot be sealed again and so I am a lockless door. My waystone lies bold and silent, hidden in plain sight and alive beneath thriving moss, vibrant as my eye on the secret mysteries of the world.

I believe the quest for the wind’s name has been my life’s calling. Through a slanted gaze, I have ventured upon this quest, and I know I will find it on my spirit’s tongue.