The sentence read its last line with the sound of crisp paper turning.
Ifrid's shaky hands grip the page, with lines emboldened in his eyes.
The stories of man against the world.
Tales of lost fairies and legend tragic, robbing the breath, all but lacked an ending.
Wishes of a line to complete the song sung short — heavy breath, pressed by air, paper within reach yet not appended.
Spinning words on the page rearranged themselves by his disposition to his imagination.
Ifrid looked up from the book; phantom letters followed as his eyes rose.
A haze of purple and green in blobs and splashes smeared his sight as evening light descended beyond the horizon — the vague cities of light shattered with a broken trance.
With a limp body, Ifrid rose and hobbled to the walls and shelves of books, his shadow looming taller than he was high.
The senses still heightened assaulted him: the wisps of the streets dominated by oppressive silence and of incense, the smell of humans veiled heavily by their perfume.
Stepping to the pendulum. Ifrid steps weakly grew, his form became higher, and the book dragging along rose from the rugged table into his grip.
Eyes glanced past each row and column of bindings, arranged differently by different readers.
Hand glided along the rows; bumps and ridges tell its own tale. A forest of covers crossed by him, from dried hide and rough leather to delicate paper and finished varnish.
But something else caught Ifrid's gaze.
Marble.
A Slate sits on the shelves. In stone engraved in the ever-reverend Old Vocatia, 'New.' Under the bold characters, a translation in Tyati writes 'Beginning.'
"Beautiful," Ifrid said by its ordained beauty.
Lonely in words, the lines inscribed exuded solemn devotion to the craft.
'Who would've dared think of using Old Vocatia in such a manner? Who dare etch on the stone these glyphs eternal?' he thought.
Ifrid's hand reached for the book and felt the cold sensation of stone stuck, pulling his warmth and, along with it, him.
A feeling engulfed him, washed over him — a tide of something that crawled under his skin and scratched every itch in his body.
His instinct flared and dulled simultaneously, a juxtaposition of sensation that sent his hair rising all over his body.
Ifrid's hand tightened around the book with the book gripping back, pulling the hand's skin to the surface divine.
Emotions like the monsoon that rose in harmonious chaos that compelled. Ifrid carried the book to the librarian, who was as studious as ever, and handed it over.
"I'm borrowing the book. Someone will return it on my behalf in due time."
The librarian bowed and produced a ledger from under the counter.
He wrote the book's name on the ledger, then copied what was on it to a slip and handed it to Ifrid.
***
It doesn't take long for Ifrid to get home from the library.
Followed by the escort of servants, he returned to the manor just before the night.
The hustle and bustle of the streets dies with dusk; the cleared street is easily traversed, as opposed to the chaos of the day.
With minor nobles here and landowners there, silence rang the monastery bell.
Cold blue air accompanied the dark sky, garden, and flowers veiled by a curtain of darkness.
Led through the courtyard lit by lanterns clattering in the wind and chimes singing crystal songs, he walked past the statue of those long gone.
Left up the stairwell, Ifrid arrived at his study through his chamber.
Loose stacks of paper, towers of books, and notes meticulously scribed between pages like bookmarks yet scatter the room like trash.
Thread dragged along the ground strung with crossed names and crept up the wall with the mark like moss creep.
Sounds of burning candles, molten wax flowing in columns.
Flame in the lantern, drawing oil through the wick, pulling outside air to fan the blaze and flame.
The polish gleamed on the desk, made of dark wood, illuminated by wax alongside the crowded surface of paper.
Thud.
Paper fluttering flew all over the place, and the candles flickering burned fiercer by the wind.
Cleared of all the desk clutter but the white marble book. The cover seems to glow in a holy aura.
Angled surfaces give the stage for the dancing light. Cover mixed with marble and metal reflected light across the surface of the entire room.
Excitement wells up within him, but not without a sudden apprehension.
A book of unnatural origin, made of marble whiter than snow.
If priests, monks, or those pious were to see, they'd charge him with blasphemy.
'But so what?'
Priests and bishops had long sinned; a few coins in the right place are such indulgence enjoyed.
Ifrid's hands trace across the book, along the coldness in the stone cover that gleams under candlelight, the smooth sensation to the skin akin to silk trying to draw him in.
The cover weighs heavily as he tries to open it — unnaturally so.
A weight extending beyond his psyche made him question how he easily carried the book home.
Pried open with great labor, a flood of questions assaulted him after.
'How did he ignore the book cover made of stone?'
'Why did he not try skimming through the page first, taking for granted that it was free of curses?'
'Why would anyone put Old Vocatia on the cover? Is that not heresy?'
'Why was he so attracted to it?'
Yet his motion doesn't cease, propelled by his inertia and drawn by what appeared after.
Paper whiter than silk, whose grain remains invisible even under scrutiny.
Blank page with no denotation of who authored the book or the date of its publication.
'Strange.'
Page after another, feeling the rigid elasticity of paper.
Pure white, similar to the cover, thin to make one question why it isn't transparent.
He kept flipping until a sharp tang on his index brought his thought back to him.
A thin streak of red. The blood seeping through would have tainted the pure white book.
Panicked, Ifrid looked back toward the book to find it immaculate.
Stranger still, the book was on the first page, even after constantly flipping.
An ominous feeling rose, the same sense of fear that underpins awe.
Fear of the divine, the unknown, and the sublime.
Ifrid looked at the page.
He turned over and beheld the characters and glyphs unfamiliar to him appearing on the page.
Languageless lines of ingrown stokes, strung by thorns, bulbous and angled, leached on the pristine page.
There was no grace to the stroke nor the consistency of a print.
Each character was offensive and seemed to squirm and bubble uncomfortably.
Blank ink eating away at the light and purity of the book reached their rotted hands out toward him.
By a drawn curtain of offense, they reveal to him their voice.
In inhuman tongue, those phonics read to him the dissonant voice of objective—the axiom of truth immutable.
Unveil the word now for what they are: a vision unaltered.
Indifferent to the world, to the occurrence of all but its view and observation, report.
The meaning in each word stood towering, looking down as the reader read.
Ifrid reaches out his hand for the marble book.
Slam.
He pushed himself out of his chair and distanced himself from the book.
Yet the sentence invades him.
Serpents of text wreath around him coiled with venomous tongue.
Phantom eyes bloom like a field of flowers, each focusing on him and his motion.
They violated him, defiled him, probed his deepest thoughts, and saw his darkest times.
Ifrid felt seen, observed, and powerless, played by a force out of his control, a mere actor to an indifferent audience.
His inside was stuffed and suffocating. A revolting feeling felt in his stomach and chest.
A malice of indifference and powerlessness drowns the room like the fatal poison of the mind.
The purity of white is a facade, and the black that taints it is the devil's mark. Together, they complete each other.
He knew in that book was a path he should not, no, cannot cross: an abyss that will swallow his rationale whole, beyond any god or greater power.
Step by step, he retreats from the book and destain, evident in his gaze.
An unbridled hatred and urge well up in him, the universe's urge to eliminate something foreign to its body, to clean one hand of dirt and grime.
Clank.
In his haste, he knocked over the bottle of ink.
But he saw nothing but the emptied bottle of ink at his feet.
For the ink was pooling under the book; all the bottle content crawled upward into the book, which greedily absorbed the ink into its blackening page.
Darkness spread from the book and absorbed everything into its tide, him with it.
Thus, the world turned the same color as the book.