The Forbidden Ink of Truth
Legend excitedly illustrates the early inhabitants of earth laying within the blades of grass among a large mass of greenery, stretched out lazily as they gazed up ahead at the shimmering stars scattered across the midnight sky. They wondered what these glittering specs glued up there were — if they were wishes sent up to heaven, or the souls of past lives watching over them, or other worlds entirely different from their own. As they pondered over this, one person lifted their finger to point at the sky, where an object was spotted falling from the sky and land somewhere in the distance. Everyone believed it to be one of the stars to have fallen, and they wasted no time in scrambling up on their feet to track the whereabouts of the mysterious, fallen star.
After tracking its whereabouts, the people had finally pinpointed its location, and their curious gazes fell on an immaculately small, glowing box crafted from a mystical material they have never seen before, with intricate carvings of a foreign language they could not identify. The bravest person out of the group of people reached out to lift the box off the ground, and they tentatively opened it. They gasped as they huddled around it, staring with intrigue at a black, sleek fountain pen resting on a crimson coloured cushion within the box. They traveled back to their village with it, claiming it as their own — a gift sent down from the heavens.
The early inhabitants of the earth soon discovered what the fountain pen did, and they believed it to be magic. When one of the men accidentally left the pen unattended on a piece of fabric, he came back and realised that it had spilled its ink on it. Frowning, he picked the pen up in his hands, and placed its tip on a clean portion of the fabric, and before he knew it, the pen started to write of its own accord, dragging his hand with it.
The pen wrote, “your wife is with child.”
Of course, this was bewildering predicament, and the man demanded that the village doctor must visit his home at once. Everyone soon discovered that the pen was telling the truth, and the man’s wife was carrying their child in her.
The pen since then became the teller of justice, and the gift of honesty. Everyone in the village took a turn to use it, and benefit from its truth-telling. However, as they never understood the strange language carved into the fountain pen’s box, they never got to heed the warning distinctly crafted into it.
“Not every truth will bring you peace, and not every soul can handle the truth.”
This carving onto the box was soon proven to be a correct statement, for the pen had started to scribble down secrets that people preferred to keep hidden, scribbles for everyone to see, and people were starting to fall into trouble because of it.
“He stole your bread.”
“She pretended to be sick to not attend her own wedding.”
“He is having an affair.”
“She is not in love with her husband.”
Although they were blatant truths, they were also the source of destruction to many homes in the village, and they soon came to the callous conclusion that this pen was not a gift, but rather a curse thrown at them from the deepest pits of hell. A remnant of one of the many curses trapped in Pandora’s box. An atrocious act sent to them from the demonic devil himself. The people of the village unanimously agreed to banish this artefact somewhere no one would find it once again, and so, the strongest men took the treacherous journey of traveling across the land to the biggest ocean they could find. They sailed through harsh storms and struggled to maintain their hunger, but as soon as they were deep enough in the Pacific Ocean, they hauled the box sealing the pen in it, into the depths of the dark waters.
Legend says that the box carrying the fountain pen still rests stubbornly somewhere in the deep underwater corals, a home to the aquatic creatures now, and although the modern people of the earth knew of this legend, to this day, they still try to fish it back out. Perhaps they are wiser now, and can handle severe truths. Maybe they believe they will use it better than their ancestors.
However, one thing is certain.
Humanity will never learn from its past mistakes.
