The page was white before her, and then it was not as words appeared.
I will die.
She tore it away. Beneath it lay another page, just as white, and she set her pen to it with great care, meaning to write something else entirely. A river, perhaps. A mountain. A girl walking home in the rain. Anything at all.
And yet...
I will die.
She tore that one away too!
The floor around her desk was deep in pages. Hundreds of them, thousands, drifting in soft white banks against the legs of her chair, and every one of them said the same three words in the same neat hand. Her hand. She had not meant to write a single one of them!
She sat at the heart of an Existential Immense Domain, and it was not hers. It was far too grand to be hers. It was a library that had no walls, only shelves, shelves that climbed up past the reach of any sight and went on climbing, carved from a dark and polished wood that had never grown on any tree.
