Page 34 of The Book That Held Her Heart

“Don’t look,” Mayland instructed. “It’s very easy to be led astray here. And those who do, don’t come back.”

As the column of light beneath the star drew ever closer, so did the dreamlike surroundings, and the terrain became harder to navigate, as if the crimson ray had struck down with physical force that had created larger and larger page-dunes, like the ripples in a pond where a stone has fallen.

A strange vibration began to fill the air, a buzzing that made Evar lick his teeth. The beam seemed to touch down just over the next, and largest yet, page-dune, the light spreading to paint the ground blood-red and drench every member of their small group in crimson.

Celcha turned, seeking a path over the last obstacle, and as she did, something made Evar look up, squinting into the glare of the distant star.

“That can’t be good.” Beside him Starval looked too, shading his eyes.

The light flickered then faltered and was swallowed away. The descending page cloud looked like a heavy fluid poured into a lighter one, billowing, pluming, plunging down, spreading out, plunging again, spreading and spreading.

A descending ceiling of seething paper promised to engulf them within moments.

“Grab hold of each other,” Celcha instructed, her voice urgent.

And then, with a rustlingwhoof, everything was falling pages.

“Clovis?” The endless fall of paper swallowed Evar’s shout. “Starval?”

They’d been right beside him. Clovis to his left, Starval just behind. Yet now as he waded forward, climbing to keep from being buried, he felt utterly alone.

The vaults’ twilight, as sourceless as the library’s illumination, could not be cut off by the page-fall as the star’s red glare had been, and even amid the downpour Evar could see. His gaze caught for a moment on the most recent page to fill his reaching hand. Amazed, he snatched another from the air, then another.

“Livira?” It was her handwriting that sprawled across the paper. He scooped up a handful and flicked them away, one by one, spitting out an errant page that tried to enter his open mouth. “It’s not possible.” Butsurely a single book couldn’t account for the heaps around him, let alone the greater storm still descending. He reached for another as it fell.

Livira’s carelessly graceful hand occupied the page from one side to the other, devouring space with loops and curls. Brushing aside more page-fall, he started to read.“You’re sure they can’t see us?”As he read them the words sounded in his head, not in his voice but in one that carried a familiar edge.

Evar looked up. The storm had gone. Everything had gone. A startlingly blue sky reached across a wide expanse of churned earth spotted with the shattered stumps of trees. He turned in the direction the voice had seemed to come from. At first, he saw nothing but more wasteland. His eyes felt strange, his vision split into overlapping fields that offered confusing multiples of everything. But…there! Shimmering like a heat haze…there was something. He tilted his head, tried to squint. Faint, ghostly, but there. Not more than a hundred yards away, coming into sharper view as he focused. Four human females: Livira in her librarian’s robe, flanked by two women of similar age in tattered dresses, and at the fore, a child, Yute’s daughter, white as her father.

“You! Stop!” Someone behind him, barking the words like orders.

Evar started forward, trying to shout Livira’s name. He felt strange, barely in control of his body, but he kept his fractured vision focused on Livira.It’s me!he wanted to shout but somehow couldn’t. Livira should be running to his arms, not just standing there, watching with what seemed like a mixture of trepidation and distaste. Her two friends, one he recognised from Yute’s group, looked terrified, barely able to keep from sprinting away. The girl from Yute’s group—Meelan’s sister—looked as scared as when they’d first met and he’d been the first canith she’d ever seen up close, certainly the first not trying to kill her.

Evar readied himself to run. The four humans might be ghosts, just as he and Livira had been. If they flew away, he’d never catch them.

“Stop!” That voice again. Evar ignored it, only to find his whole body locked tight, utterly paralysed.

“Back in line!” the unseen master called, and Evar’s body answered. He turned and found himself unable even to flinch at the shock discovery that he was bracketed on either side by a full-grown skeer. Worse, he was marching back towards a column of hundreds of the things.

At the edge of his sight, he spotted the small figure that seemed to be the source of the commands. A ganar, a tiny, harmless ganar in charge of maybe two hundred skeer. It made no sense. What made even less sense was the growing realisation that not only was he not in command of his body, his body wasn’t his at all. With shuddering disgust Evar understood that some of the white limbs churning the dirt around him were in fact…his.

In desperation, Evar screamed Livira’s name. The cry emerged as nothing but message-scent, but it was enough to draw the scrutiny of the skeer to either side of him.

The skeer marched on. Evar couldn’t even turn his head to see Livira.

“This is a dream, a nightmare.” Understanding arrived late. “I’m in her story.” It should have been obvious but the sight of Livira just yards away had bound him to the narrative and the horror of finding himself a skeer had taken over, keeping his mind too occupied to ask the important questions instead of the immediate ones. “It’s just a story.”

But how had Livira written a tale about skeer? When had she written it? How could he escape it? He ignored the many-legged advance that surrounded him and tried to remember where he’d come from.The star! The page-fall!

Evar focused on the memory of the descending page-storm that had engulfed him and his siblings. He remembered the blackness as it had tried to smother him. And in that blind memory a sucking blackness drew him down a well of its own making.

Evar had hoped to escape, but when the darkness let him go, it wasn’t back into the page-storm.

Where? Where am I? What am I?He was no longer a skeer. He was something else, somewhere else, something worse. He lay on a table in a chamber lit by a pulsing crimson light, a chamber that looked more grown than made. Ganar moved around him, their pelts bloody in the light.

Evar had been drawn into Livira’s stories before, but they had never been like this. They had been charming, sometimes sad, but always a place to be with her, to explore together and to deepen his understanding of this being who had taken hold of his heart. But this was something else. Some dark and tainted fever-dream. He couldn’t move, not even to turn his head.At least when he had been the skeer he had been alone in the shell of that great beast, slave to the limitations of its body but at the helm in all other regards. Here he felt as though he were adrift in a small open boat on a vast black sea, heaved high and laid low by the swell, and that he was far from alone, for the sea was a mind much larger than his, and the huge waves were only the outer ripples of its pain and of its anger.

The contemplation of any single object will eventually draw in every other, and with them all wisdom. But a swifter path to understanding our kind is to consider a child stamping upon ants.

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