He has failed.

No, not failed—failed is too strong a word, too contemptuous of what he has achieved. For are there not literal pints of sepia laid down within a blood-red tome, polished and pristine? He has done this and it is not nothing.

Neither is it everything. The knowledge that it will live long past him is cold comfort and sweet balm both. After all it is his legacy, his benediction, his child; the only one he will ever have…

But it is also an ambiguity.

For reality sits, cast to the side of fictive crimson. Words, so many words there, and all of them scrawled hastily upon a thick stack of unbound papers. These are not the Book—the Book, arrayed before him like an offering, is only for the final draft—he has spent vast amounts of parchment readying himself to lay down final ink to final surface.

But these unbound words?—ah, they elude him, tease him, mock him. They are not enough, yet they are too much. He has not enough mastery over them. It is all too overwhelmingly close; he cannot bear what they would tell him so he shies away, raises his hand as if to shield from the brilliant darkness of what is Real.

One by one he gathers up the loose pages, hands trembling. He knows wherein lies the failure. To express passion one must hold passion.

Once he did; he can cast aside the grey curtain of memory to recall that much. Once he eagerly seized such passion and wielded it all fiery in his grasp, felt the power of it slick through his veins and the sparks of it burn behind his eyes, submitted to the swell and ebb of excitement and achievement and control.

Now?

Now it eludes him. He has wrestled with it in the dawn, in the depths of night, in the waning afternoons. He has tried—oh, how he has tried to grasp it, hold it. Always he fights to regain it, always he does battle merely to limp away and lick his wounds, and in the end always does he flee from raw, wildfire longing to the perdition of controlled prose, to the safe, sane ambiguity of absolutes: Light and Dark, Heroes and Magic, a world Noble beyond parallel, a Quest needful and gallant.

These separate, wilding pages—they are neither safe nor sane. He has attempted to chain the wind, to wield lightning. He has attempted to scribe his soul to parchment yet still it burns, unsated. Unshriven.

Unspoken.

Perhaps some truths cannot be told. Or, more likely, perhaps he no longer has the ability to tell them. The mechanism within—the shades of grey within the realm of black and white, the heated flash beneath the ancient creak of plot and story—it is gone. Like everything else has his Voice been laid waste, broken, purest spirit siphoned away by craven malice.

He rises, the loose leaves of parchment held gently to his chest, and walks slowly over to the fire.

It is easy, so easy. In pensive silence he feeds the dog-eared pages, one at a time, to the hungry flames; he watches, still silently, as the abortive effort of months flares up white-hot, shrivels into orange-blue luminosity. The flames lick high, reflect into flatly-satisfied eyes which do not even shed a tear.

So little…

So much…

Gone.

Finally he rises and treads heavily back over to his writing desk. Behind him charred pieces of parchment still occasionally burst into brilliance; before him bound pages shimmer in the reflection of the fire. He lays a hand upon the Book, smiles briefly.

It is better, this way. Better they never know what It truly did to him. Better they focus on what was gained, not lost, gift instead of sacrifice.

Better this crimson-bound cadence of impossible enchantment, lovely worlds, and language to set the stars alight should shine brightly, not burn darkly.

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