First Calligrapher
Legendary cultural figure of the Ink Splattered people
One breezy autumn day, First Calligrapher, who was then simply a poet, took a walk. They found a fallen bird’s nest with three cracked eggs. The fourth egg, buried underneath, began cracking, and out from the speckled egg a small chick burst, chirping merrily. Enamored by this tiny creature, First Calligrapher took it home to raise.
The chick grew quickly on a diet of carefully shredded meat, shedding its down for ombre feathers streaked with sharp bursts of scarlet. First Calligrapher would spend hours mesmerized by its flight, from the early small stutters to confident, spiraling glides.
They even named the bird “Little Red.” First Calligrapher crafted a nest for the bird to live in, leaving a window open so that the bird could leave and return as it pleased. So, First Calligrapher didn’t think much of it when the bird failed to return one night. Perhaps it had simply flown a bit further than usual, they reasoned.
But Little Red didn’t return the next night either. Worried, First Calligrapher set out in search of the bird, calling its name in vain until they stumbled upon a small, still figure. So different from its graceful aerial form was the corpse that First Calligrapher was at first unable to recognize their friend. Determined to memorialize this bird which had so gifted them joy, First Calligrapher burnt the body with the nest they had made, and mixed the bone black that remained with their own blood and tears to create ink. “My heart is ash,” they said, “and I shall bleed beauty.” Cutting a lock of their own hair, First Calligrapher fashioned a brush, which they used to create the first calligraphy character for “bird.”
Like a bird in flight, fluid and free, First Calligrapher sought to make the character portray the essence of their bird. That first character, painstakingly painted onto the bird’s favorite tree—a white birch—is long lost to time, but it leaves its mark in First Calligrapher’s surviving works. Hidden in the trellises of a vine poem about roots, on the moon in a painting poem praising Azboran, stark in the center of every bird poem, the character became First Calligrapher’s signature.
