The bell does not ring, because you have silenced it.
It is Christmas night, and you have slipped into the antique shop while its owner counts his coins by candlelight. The air is thick with dust and old time. Every object here has outlived its owner — and every object, you will find, means something.
You are not only here to steal. You are here to learn what these things stand for.
Great writers rarely describe an object just because it is there. They choose objects that carry meaning — a symbol. When a symbol returns again and again, it becomes a motif. Together they let a writer build a theme without ever stating it outright.
In this lesson you will gather symbols of your own, and use them to build a dark story — the story of how you came to be here, in the dark, holding a candle.
You turn, and a stranger is watching you — until you realise the stranger is you, caught in a tall, tarnished mirror.
A mirror is never just glass. What might it stand for, here, tonight?
You lift the candle. As the light moves, words seem to fly out of the shadows toward you — some you can touch, some you cannot.
Catch only the abstract ones.
Before you is the shopkeeper's counter; behind it, shelves climb into the dark, crowded with curiosities.
Each object is a possible symbol. Choose the ones that speak to you — you will need them for your story.
Hold the symbol you chose. Let it pull a memory out of the dark.
We will build your backstory in stages — and the symbol will appear, changed, in each one.
From somewhere in the shop, music begins — slow, familiar, returning. On the counter, a single flower stands in a glass. As the music plays, it begins to wilt.
A motif is a symbol that keeps coming back. Watch this one change.
The stranger in the mirror speaks at last. Symbols, he says, can point downward — or up.
Choose the symbol you will carry out of the shop.
You step out of the shop carrying more than you came for — a handful of symbols, a motif that will not leave your head, and the beginnings of a theme.
Lesson complete. The rest of the shop is still being built…