AN: April Fool's! Obviously I didn't disappear (since I still reviewed... oops). I did read my story out loud, but, alas, either the words were not good enough, or I don't have the gift to read things in and out of stories. However, if anyone can read things in and out of stories, I will be posting a 2nd chapter where the person reading the story goes to the Inkworld, so feel free to read it out loud, I would just ask if you could read the first chapter first, so I can join you ;)
Once upon a time, there was a story, a magical story.
But before there was the story, there was a girl who loved stories. Exotic stories of dragons and elves and spaceships and magic sung by black letters on white pages. She had grown up on stories- even before she could read, her mother had spun fantastic worlds and inquisitive heroes out of scraps of words and her imagination and brought them to life with the magic of her voice. Her father had even opened up the world of hairy-footed hobbits and grey-bearded wizards locked behind doors of print with his deep, vibrating voice.
Though she did eat food, sometimes she thought that all her real sustenance came from words and the stories they weaved like spider-webs. Sometimes, she even forgot her own stomach's voice, drowned out by the words.
Then she read the story.
The magic of the book captivated her, for it was a story as much about stories and books and a young girl (not unlike herself) who loved them as much as it was a story about magic and an evil prince and an un-heroic fire-breather who performed heroic deeds. Indeed, in the course of the story, the young girl who loved stories joined one, and slipped inside the words of a book.
The story spoke to the first girl with many voices; voices of fear that made her heart thud, a voice of confusion for the predicament of the girl so like herself, and a voice of cheerful triumph at the evil prince's death. Yet over all of the voices which yelled at, sang to or hypnotized the girl, one quiet voice stood out. A voice which whispered, "Why not you? Could you not do the same thing and slip between the covers of this book?"
A voice within the girl's head very firmly replied "Yes, wouldn't that be nice if it were true, but it's not, it's fiction." And another said "Yes, and, anyways, would you really want to go to a world where women can't even earn a living?"
But a voice in her heart said "We can create stories. We know how to spin words. What if we did write something where we went there and met all those wonderful characters?" And another in her heart said, "Yes, and we could read it aloud, too..."
So the girl wrote, and when she was finished writing, she took the battered old notebook and the purple pen to a quiet place in the house, and she read out loud what she had written, trying to ignore the voices in her head. And when she looked up, she found herself no longer in her parents' house, but in an old farm-house where lived a bookbinder called Silvertongue with his family.