Aerials.

The ink of the pen filled the iotas of the paper, drowning it in black like smoke filling in the trenches of a burning battlefield.

It was as if the words were already written, so the ink simply followed the path of least resistance upon the page. Mirroring the parchment was a blackened hand. Not charred, but dirtied by the walnut it knew so well. Would it ever wash off? Not likely, it had been stained again and again, and this time was no different. Washed often, perhaps, but not nearly as often as it was bled into by the souls of words and cascading drawings which littered the tiny desk of the writer.

The skritch skritch skritch of the quill passing the paper was such a familiar sound that it now brought comfort to the writer who was barely even aware of it. A white noise that soothed the soul of the enraged monster put to elegant words perhaps. More likely, a grand cacophony, filling the mind with the constant scenes of revelry, lust, destruction, birth, life, death and all manner of other things seen fit to grace the swatches of paper which would eventually be constructed into a book. Like the bones of a tome, the words were the foundation of all that the writer poured into life.

The hands steadily raced across the pages, filling in the words with a practiced skill, he knew just how to balance the quill so that a single drop never touched the paper unless he willed it so. Gravity was no factor here. As if he could control the ink itself, command it, not as a slave, but like water through an aqueduct of Rome. It was elegant, and beautiful. Like most readers of his works, though, they did not know of the process gone into the creation of a masterpiece.

He dipped the quill into a black box. He paused for a moment. Staring in contemplation, the man looked up from his desk. Was it possible. Perhaps he could live more if he were to write the adventures of his own life, not with ink, but with his own two feet. He had begun writing at an incredibly young age, and though many things distracted him from it, he had always been writing, even while doing other things. Maybe it was time to stop writing; to take action. To mold his life the way he had his stories. He could always return to them if need be after all, but to continue forward, out the door of his home. There was no doubt that his stories were amazing, but had he lost fulfillment on the way? Lost himself? Lost everything he had ever loved, given everything away for a pittance in comparison to the lives of those in his grand epics?




The door hung open to grand cabin. It was a spartan dwelling, no pictures, no hangings. Very few objects at all were in the home, except for the basic needs. A table in the kitchen, littered with parchment, envelopes, tomes, dusty pages, old cheeses, breads and other accoutrements. The kitchen could not be called dirty, but it was not clean either. Thick dust was caked around almost all areas, and fingerprints were easily seen on knives, cabinets and other furniture.

In the center of the room was an empty desk with an inkwell and some papers, which were half written.

The room was completely empty, as the sun shown through a window. It reflected on the copious dust in the air after someone had abandoned the cabin, taking only a quill, perhaps a reminder of things left behind.