Sa looked at himself through a dream.
He was sitting there, in an old friend's rocking chair, trying to read a book.
The clouds raced across the sky, passing in front of the sun like a strobe light. Through his only window, the sunlight flickered.
He had never learned how to read. Nobody had ever taught him anything. He didn't know the difference between one language or the next. Sa had never thought of how words could be visualized, to him, they were packets of sound and meaning. He wondered if other people tried to read books like he did.
His imagination imposed itself onto the pages. As he stared longer, his gaze went deeper and he would see the story painted between the lines. He asked the characters questions and listened to their stories.
They voiced their lines of dialogue, weaving in the stories of their lives. They connected their worlds to other worlds trapped between the covers that Sa had explored.
Sa wondered if other people explored the imagination of the beings locked to the pages of manuscripts and novels like he did. He wondered whether these everlasting and infinite souls would ever earn expression in the reader's world. Whether they would ever evolve out of the book and enjoy a free, non-fatalistic existence.
Sa knew that beings freed from the prison of paper and ink would never be able to settle. They would forever be restless travelers. Ever since escaping, they would be cursed with an itch to see where they had come from.
It was this world, outside of the book, where all hopes and dreams, drama and tragedy, conflict and resolution, joke or fable, originate. After magic has captured the essence of a yet uncreated plot, setting, theme or character, it is ready to be sentenced to the destiny that all stories share.
It was an unforeseen consequence that since the first written word, the written word has touched the writing world just as much as it has been influenced by itself. The stories captured between two covers, two pages or two lines are now beings in our world as much as we ourselves are. The first book has influenced every book since, the first characters are still alive through the expression of every character invented since.
A being born into a book never dies.
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