The Reader
A small feeble girl with deathly pale skin and long bright blue hair walked through the endless darkness with no destination in sight. She was barely the age of ten and it was a miracle in itself that the darkness did not swallow her whole. As she walked through the endless dark, she slowly came across a library with no doors, walls, or ceilings. She had no clue as to where, how, or when she was, as time and space held no sway over this realm that she existed in. Her body was ethereal and had a distinct lack of any physicality, and that included the blue cloth robe she wore. Shadowy bookshelves full of infinite and incomprehensible knowledge divided into strange books of all shapes and sizes, dimensions, and even sounds that stretched outward, above, below and all around her. There were even books that if looked at properly could not even begin to be considered conventional books, being of non-Euclidean geometrical shapes. Yet to her small and fleeting spirituality that wavered and swayed like a tiny candle flame they were very much conceptualized as books to her.
The smell of lavender mixed with the slight hint of dried pepper reached her nose, leaving her in a half aware yet at the same time half entranced state. Despite the fact that everything she stopped looking at around her faded into absolute darkness, the immediate surroundings were lit by the luminescence of her spirit body.
She stopped at a small bookshelf, no higher than a meter and a half that was made of sleek black wood that was both sturdy and inviting. When she looked at it, there was only one book on a shelf around the level of her face.
Reaching out her hand to the book which was not much larger than the novels gifted by her teacher Cato El Altestan, she grasped it in her hand. It was soft to the touch and was of a calming blue color. The cover felt somewhere between hide and cloth, yet it gave her the feeling of complete indestructability, as if there was nothing in the heavens or the world below that could damage it at all.
Holding the book in her tiny hands, she gently opened it and looked to the first page. What greeted her was not a page of text, or even a picture. Instead, she felt herself being pulled towards the page, as if the book was attempting to pull her inside of it and devour her tiny spiritual body. In just that one second of looking at the book, several visions rapidly flashed through her mind in quick succession.
The first was a massive white tower of polished stone that reached drastically higher than anything she had ever seen before as a mountainous spire that pierced into a black sky. It dwarfed her so completely that she could barely comprehend where it started and where it ended despite being directly in front of it. A lighting bolt flashed and struck the tower with a bone rattling thunderclap that threatened to disperse her spiritual body despite being at such an immensely far distance away.
Not a moment later, golden flames began lapping and consuming their way out of the infinite windows that she only now noticed on the walls of the tower. The golden flames quickly grew until they became an inferno that threatened to devour the entire tower, before dying down just as quickly as they grew. They left nothing but trails of smoke that meandered and moved, forming strange shapes and symbols before finally dissolving into the endless darkness.
Then the tower and storm disappeared, and she felt herself being pulled and stretched to an extent that her body felt odd and sluggish, as if just moving cost her all of her mental willpower and focus.
She was now in Coda village, standing tall against an overwhelming shadow in the sky that was bearing down fast upon her and her village. Raising something covered in shadowy fog with both hands, the shadow was sucked into the item she could not quite see.
At that moment a slicing pain that dug into her skull like a blade had forced it's way into her head through her eyes and broke through the bone into her brain itself. Esoteric and incomprehensible whispers began to dominate all of her senses as she writhed silently on the dark ground. Her eyes turned completely black, and her spiritual body was beginning to wither and dim as something incomprehensible and horrible had noticed her.
Instantly everything was over and Lelei awoke with a agonized shriek that sounded like the death rattle of some maddened beast instead of any sound a human should ever make. Something out there in that dark realm beyond time and space had noticed her and had invaded her mind for one brief moment. Yet just the act of even hearing it's whispers had almost drove the small girl irreparably insane.
All this time, the blackness that had clouded her eyes like a layer of viscous ink had not receded even a centimeter.
The sound of her teacher shouting for her and rushing up the stairs of the house the two shared to her room with a haste that was in direct contradiction to the elderly body he owned that for all intents and purposes would have been stiff and slow with age was drowned out by the residual whispers and blackness from her strange spiritual state she had just awoken from.
As the man barged in the room, his long pointy hat falling off his aged head with a small paff sound as it struck the carpet, the blackness receded from the tiny girl's eyes and she let out a gasp as her body slowly began to feel the feelings and she saw the sights all about her.
Tears fell from her eyes as she began to slowly recover from the madness inducing words she heard. Then as if a coin was flipped and it landed on a fortunate side, the madness and ravings were gone, leaving in their wake a calm and placid feeling.
All that was left of that horrible experience was a single unforgettable image that was planted deep into her mind and subconscious: An open blue book full of incomprehensible scribblings.