ŷ������

For day after day Cole had tried to pour himself into the story, as if the ink were his blood and he might by force of will press the ineffable—the complexity that even in the shadows of his thoughts would not allow words to frame it—into the book. And every night, pushing the growing stacking of papers into its drawer, part of him would cringe to think of what any reader might make of his efforts. A toddler may paint with passion and heart ... and still what lies on the board in thick, primary colours remains a stick person of uncertain gender and purpose.

"And finally, the book, long or short, complete or incomplete, is returned to its place." He nodded at the last of the tiny graves. "To a slot in the devouring soil, or the faster appetite of the flames. Some will barely have begun the first line of their story before it ends. But there's a power in brevity. A short tale can weigh more heavily on the heart than the longest epic. And sometimes a single phrase will echo throughout eternity."

Heeth looked at Yute, unconvinced.

"Ah, Synoth said you were a sharp one. The truth, young man, is that nobody knows. The world seems cruel, life brutish, and however many words might be used to dress up such unpalatable facts, they carry a cutting edge. But I do believe that each of those lives, even the shortest, is in fact a book of many stories, and no single way of looking at them sees the whole."

Somewhere between the story, the book inside it, between Holden and you, somewhere in that dynamic ... it's about pain ... it's a message I can't write out in words. A message that couldn't ever be written out in simple lines, as if one person were explaining it to another. It's a thing that emerges between the reader and the text, and it's always changing, but it's always about the same thing."

[...]

"I think if you wrote a story about your daughter, the life she might have lived, the wonders she saw, and the people who loved her ... I think that would be real too, and that somewhere her potential would play out just like that, and in a trillion other places it would flow down every other path she might have taken��did take.

"I think Clovis will keep fighting across a thousand worlds. [...] And I think that's about pain too. And if she finds a story that resonates with her, and she returns to it year by year, she might discover another way of seeing her own wounds and live a happier life. Which is what I want for all of you."

"Has there ever been anything more intimidating than a blank page?"

"Yes, the extremis of the cavalry charge, the fire's crackling roar, the gleam upon the instruments of torture—these are a different order, but also fleeting, born in the moment. The blank page is your life, the existential 'why?', the achingly long yawn of your days, spliced with their frightening brevity.

"The blank page is where you search for meaning, strive to show that you have some, learn that no such thing exists. Take that pristine field of white and drag your quill across it. A glistening black river remains in its wake, a dividing line that in its meanders carries a code, a story, both lies and truth can hide there in those convolutions, and the��"

"It's a bit overwrought, isn't it?" [...]

"I rather like it. Here's a man arguing that ultimately nothing matters, and yet he's doing it with such passion that clearly it matters very much to him. The dichotomy is amusing."

[...]

And if the epitoad had followed her to demand an epilogue, she would have stared at the blank page, her head filled with thoughts of both the permanent and the temporary, thoughts of the love that knows itself to be doomed and in that acceptance reaches new levels. And as her hand hovered above the page her head would also fill with thoughts of the hate that reaches for immortality as if there's a validation in forever that triumphs the beauty found only in moments.