Why is Ciplusius a man?

The first time they saw a supposed portrait of Ciplusius, they didn't think too much of it. It was a bit flattering, sure, that someone was inspired enough by their writing to create art, but it was only one limited interpretation. And, in their opinion, it was rather flat, as it only captured the surface qualities of Ciplusius, a portrait painted after only a single reading, without sitting with the words for days / months / decades to appreciate the nuances, to tease out possible alternate readings, to guess at what the author may have been trying to do with Ciplusius given the context...

No matter, it was fan art, and only one piece of fan art. It didn't have that much impact on them, on Ciplusius. It couldn't.

But it did.

Over the decades, they watched, first in slow motion and then whipping down the track like a high-speed train – that one piece of fan art, that single, 2-dimensional rendering, began to be regarded as a portrait of...them. The author had become equated with Ciplusius, the writer with the written.

And there was nothing they could do about it. It was a mindfuck, walking past a bookstore and seeing a supposed portrait of them watching over the table piled with copies of the newest edition.

Assigning the face someone had given to Ciplusius to the author had suddenly made their poems a bestseller. An overnight sensation, after centuries of largely being ignored. It had gone too far to stop it now, being equated with that face – beautiful and serene, but a face with no reality behind it.

If they suddenly stuck their hand up now and said “actually, that's not what I look like”, they would most definitely be ignored. As they had been for centuries.

They didn't look anything like Ciplusius, whether in the form of that particular piece of fan art, or anyone else's imagined rendering. Other than the same colour of hair.

The fan art: a seer, a timeless but unapproachable being, hiding some sort of arcane knowledge behind that peaceful but piercing (and slightly judgmental) gaze. The colourful garb indicating taste, contentment, perhaps wealth.

The actual author: an androgynous artist, uncomfortable with meeting anyone's gaze, wearing their nearly all-black clothes as armour, posture nearly permanently tilted as an outward expression of their constant questioning of everything, their suspicion of everything, their guardedness against everything.

And they weren't entirely sure they cared enough to correct the mistake; they could just avoid walking past bookstores until the interest in their poems inevitably died down.

But, some nights, they dreamt as if they were Ciplusius. Not about Ciplusius, but being Ciplusius. Like, they'd look in the mirror, and there was the fan art face. The fictional face was becoming merged with their own. A face they'd managed to keep secret for centuries – nearly millennia – for no reason other than their face didn't matter, shouldn't matter, for reading the character of Ciplusius.

Now that Ciplusius' fictional face had been made their own by consensus, it completely changed the reading of the poems. Ciplusius had been made real, when Ciplusius was never intended to be real. Ciplusius was an exercise, purely an creative exercise.

That researcher 10 years back had somehow managed to dig up their number, had followed the very small trail of breadcrumbs they hadn't bothered to sweep up. They had asked permission to publish their piece – an exposé on the fan art phenomenon – and I had granted that, curious if anyone would even care. But then that researcher dropped off the map.