Work Text:
At first, it was simply a curiosity.
It appeared to be an ordinary book at first, when you had found it splayed open on the floor face-up. You surmised that it must have been there for a long, long time, as its leaves were caked in dust - to the point it seemed to dye the very first page an ashen gray.
It was a thick book. You wondered of its contents. Cryptic white symbols were etched onto the front cover, indecipherable in meaning.
You brushed the dust off the front page, sat down, and began to read.
This book, just as many books tend to, contained a story.
It wasn't a particularly impressively written story, but you would find yourself drawn to it time and time again.
It was a common story featuring common elements. A mystery, a school setting, and a cursed book. A traitor, a tragedy, and an endless loop. The characters were left unnamed, but they were unique. Eccentric in their own ways.
The cursed book became an accessory in their tragedies, but the real antagonist could hardly be known. Was it the living book whose legends came to haunt them? Was it the traitor they were told to find?
Was it the children themselves, whose suspicions of one another deceived them into a one-way trap to doom?
The tragedy repeated. Then, a narrative sleight of hand. A confrontation.
Perhaps, the words on the page read, the real "fox" was you.
The end of an act, and the beginning of a dream.
You flipped to the next act.
A mystery was unraveled about the book's origins.
The innocent children who led this tragedy crafted it themselves, willingly played their parts as they filmed and presented it in front of a festival. These children, who would be reduced to mere legends to the generation that followed them, saw the ones that would follow their trail a decade later as mere fiction.
They had loved and trusted in each other, and yet they, too, met their own tragedy, its culprit just out of their sight. A grieving child experienced an endless dream, and with that, the curtains fell before any knots could be tied.
Before you had realized it, your eyes were dancing over blank pages.
No.
You wouldn't let it end here.
You kept turning the pages. There were many of them, after all. Yet they were all unwritten. Wasted paper. Wasted space.
You flipped to the beginning, and read again.
And thus began your own endless cycle, your own endlessly repeating tragedy.
Time and time again, you would walk away from the book. And yet time and time again, you would always return. You read, and you read again, as though the crumbs you picked up fallen into the book's gutter would solve a whole story.
(And when you weren't reading, you'd see whispers of the story everywhere you go. Within common words and mundane sentences, and even the words "common" and "mundane" became anything but;
The ghosts you'd see
decorated hide-and-seek and impostors and phone calls and stolen ribbons,
echoed through conclusions and prayers and tragedies and dreams,
and gave life to numbers and colors.
Things that most would find flavorless or common—to you, when you drank them, they always would mean something else.)
You read the book a hundred times. A hundred and twenty times. By the thousand two hundredth attempt, and your brain would fill in the last digit.
One thousand, seven hundred and thirteen times.
You shone a light upon its pages as though you could uncover some final hidden message, something that could satisfy the gaping hole in your heart carved by a story that wouldn't end.
What solace was there to be found in a book whose last pages remained blank?
You tried to let it go. You really did.
But it seemed as though you had fallen under a curse, from the book about a cursed book, and led into a tragedy by a book containing endless tragedies. A book about unsolvable mysteries and unwritten endings. How ironic.
Before you lay a ghost. But try as you might, ghosts couldn't answer questions, regardless of how many times you pleaded to them.
You could only follow the ghost's trails, collect them,
burn them into your memory and into your heart,
drink up its dredges and spit them back out,
clutch it tight to your chest,
and pray to higher beings,
or to someone,
or to no one at all—please don't take this away from me. There's already so little of it left.
How could a story so permanently engraved into your being be so fragile, so small, so fleeting?
(When you're gone, when the author's gone, and when everyone who loves and remembers has gone, who will be there to keep the memory of the rumor urban legend story that no one knows, that altered the course of your own?)
This ridiculously mundane story, of an incredibly worn-out world. You don't understand how it had touched you so.
Had the author known this would be its fate?
You would never, ever know.
Still, you love, and so you write a love letter that won't receive a response.