Out of all the characters and relationships that we’ve developed for my next album, the most intriguing and complex might just be the Fortune Teller and Inventor. Lovers, born centuries apart, brought together by feverish visions and gyroscopic gears. In just a couple of days, you’ll be able to hear how their stories coalesced into musical verse and rhyme. But for today, here is the first part of their story, written by DC Bowden:
In a hot sweat she labored by candlelight. She twisted a pendant in her right hand as her left dragged across the parchment. She was no monk, no student, but she could do her best. This was the only way out for the visions that overwhelmed her. They swallowed reality up, leaving her swirling in a deep pool, remnants of strange dreams.
Though she was a mystic and a fortune-teller, she had never experienced a force such as this. It seemed that every moment for the past few weeks she had been in a drunken stupor from the visions.
There was a strange man. A man she had never seen before. He was dressed in odd clothes, his mannerisms foreign. She might have thought him a devil if those visions had not also stirred in her a passion, a deep passion of a forgotten love rising from the depths of her memory.
This man rode in a strange chariot. She saw it in her very first vision. It was there when he left her. It was a source of joy, for it brought him closer. But there was also a strange darkness about it. How could it bring joy and life, but also pain and death?
The only escape from her madness was to write and draw everything she saw. It was an important act; she could feel it in her soul. She had almost filled the book.
***
He stood on the deck of the ship and looked over the rolling sea caps. He was tired of the ocean and longed for the comfort of his house in New York City. “House” was his term, but to anyone else that saw it, they might wonder what it was. It was a maze of rooms, each one a wonder of microscopes, rotating gyros, pulsating levers, random stream bursts, and blinking lights.
His home was his workshop and his second home was the classroom. He was an inventor and professor. Light years ahead of his time, instead of being exalted and revered as genius, more often then not he was seen as an eccentric, possibly insane, tinkerer.
He could see the city skyline in the distance. But in his mind’s eye, he saw straight through the distant buildings and into the pages of a manuscript he had found in an Asian curio store. Even as he remembered the moment he first picked it up and felt the brittle pages in his hand, he felt as though the book found him just as much. And there it was, at the end of the Silk Road.
When he opened it, he was stunned. For the past decade he had been obsessed with a device…a machine, but he had been unable to complete it. To his amazement, when he opened the manuscript it was there in finished form, in pages hundreds of years old.
Now, as he neared his home and laboratory, he was beside himself with the idea of finally finishing his strange device. But just as much, he was anxious to solve the mystery of who wrote the manuscript and how these pages, dating back to medieval Italy, contained not only his device…but his face.
Tags: album, fortune teller, inventor, Song-writing