Bonfires by Lferion

Caxton's Legacy: A Voice

With a printing press and a set of type, all sorts of things may be communicated.
A triple drabble and two verses of a broadside ballad

---

Prompts -
-- Fan Flashworks, Type - posted here
-- L:G4 Masked Vigilante, A:O5 Woodcut, P:I4 Broadside Ballad, F:B3 Together, they fight crime!

*** *** ***

Someone had found plans and operating instructions for a simple broadsheet printing press. With the folio, hidden in the shadow behind the shelf-stack was a small and very battered press, and a box which, wonder of wonders, contained a set of type. The fiercely dedicated group that had coalesced around Maglor set about repairing the thing, learning everything they could about using it, what it needed to work properly. There had been no need at all to tell them how important communication, dissemination of information was. They knew what would happen if they were found with the thing, and it only made them more determined. Edain were like that. They always had been.

For them, the crime was not in teaching, speaking, reading, learning things outside the narrow bounds of permitted ideas, authorized material, it was in enforcing ignorance and error, misinformation and fear. They had a weapon with which to fight back, and they were going to use it.

They sang as they worked, bits and snatches of forbidden pieces interspersed with 'proper' songs with altered words, interpretations that changed the meaning entirely, and like a round, a canon, a thread stitching everything together, the song that started this particular resistance and revolt. The words around the statue, the tune he had written for them.

Maglor sang to the block of wood in his lap as he carefully carved what would be the header image and title of the first broadsheet they planned to print. Virtue and voice to the wood, to the image, to the words that would accompany it. The ballad that was already assembling itself in his head. They had a toe-hold, and a core of highly motivated people, carefully dispersed, they had him, who had done this before, and soon they would have a voice.

*** *** ***

Oh Virtue went barefaced and bold
About the town with purpose stern
Each transgressor young or old
Was marked for judgement: brand or burn

Mercy, masked, did quiet tread
Behind the rule-man, mead in hand
Removing marks that flowered red
Saving some from cruel remand

*** *** ***