Page 98 of The Book That Held Her Heart

Livira knew it was true. She could save Evar. She could write them both into the story they had started here. They could live a life in this tower with the witch banished forever. All it took was surrendering the rest. All it required was that Evar’s blood run through the story, and the acceptance that should the fiction be broken, he would die.

“Isn’t this enough for you?” the witch panted as he tried to shake her loose.

Wasn’t it enough? There was a war outside. She remembered that much. A chaotic, confusing, unwinnable war. One that had swallowed her up and demanded she take sides. One that had broken so much that she loved and was in the act of breaking the rest.

The witch’s eyes met her own. They had no particular colour. Like a stagnant pool lingering too long after the rains, they promised a corrupt reflection of anything shown to them. And yet, what Livira saw in them made her grip turn to iron and brought all of her resolve to bear on the matter of keeping the book.

What she had seen in her opponent’s unremarkable eyes was a familiar look. This man wasn’t Oanold. In the maybe from which she’d been so recently stolen, Oanold had titled himself the Saviour, and whether his motivations were selfish or selfless or something in between, he had placed himself between this man, this witch, this potentate, and the murder of children. But the look—the look in the potentate’s eyes—was all Oanold. It was the look Livira had seen when standing with Yute before the throne where Oanold had practised his own tyranny. A tyranny that the potentate’s made small, but a murderous, corrupt abomination even so.

“No!” Livira wasn’t having it. “No!”

And in that moment of rejection the tower melted away, taking Evar with it. Livira was still struggling with the potentate for the ownership of the book, but now it was very definitely her book, and the stage on which their contest played out was one reclaimed by memory: the throne room into which the Saviour’s raiders had forced their way.

Livira stood on the dais, facing the potentate before the throne, both with their hands gripping her book. The Saviour and his supporters layscattered around the great doors that had fallen in, all of them struggling as if wrapped in invisible sheets, their eyes focused on nothing. Livira imagined that until very recently she too had lain there, trapped in a fiction, albeit of her own making.

And even as she wrestled for her book, Livira wondered if she, along with everyone else, was not still trapped, at least to some degree, in stories of their own design.

Boss levels have become a staple of many first-person shooters. They reflect a conceit that those directing some great obscenity should embody its evil and tenacity.The Wizard of Ozoffers a truer perspective. We lift the curtain to reveal hollow gods.

The Winner’s Book of Video Gaming, by Otto Cubed

Chapter 44

Livira

The great cage imprisoning Yute and Kerrol lay five yards from the throne. But of more immediate interest was the potentate’s final guard. The man startled, as if Livira had appeared out of thin air to wrestle with his master. His surprise proved short-lived: in the next moment he raised his two-handed blade.

“Livira!” Yute called to her from the cage. “The others are scattered around us. In different maybes.”

With a huge effort, Livira wrenched the potentate around, using his grip on the book to turn him and interpose him between her and the man with the big sword.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” she shouted back. More of a scream than a shout. Any moment now the big shaven-headed warrior in his ceremonial armour would work things out and cut off both her arms with one blow of his scimitar.

“The book!” Yute shouted, gripping the bars. “It’s scattered. Join the books!”

Rather than let the potentate’s warrior gain the initiative, and with it the chance to slice her in two, Livira yelled and drove the potentate back into his bodyguard.

“Join the books!” Yute shouted.

It made no sense. What books? Scattered where? Livira found herselfflung to the side. The potentate might not be a large man, but he was taller than her and at least as strong. The bodyguard looked to his master.

“Kill her, you idiot!”

And there it was. No chance of escape. No defence.

Livira remembered in that last moment that the book was a weapon now. It had been used against her. The evidence lay at the entrance to the throne room. She almost wasted her last heartbeat berating herself as an idiot, but managed to hold off that much-deserved upbraiding, and threw her concentration into the book instead.

The potentate might have a tight hold on the physical object but his grip on the text itself was nothing but dirty cobwebs thinking they had tied down a giant in its slumbers. What made the book a weapon was the cycle it had carved through time, a burning loop that could be applied in many ways, from cutting through the titanic walls of the library to trapping a handful of insurgents in story.

Livira sent the potentate staggering back, arms flailing, as the tale of a dinner party engulfed him.

The warrior swung his scimitar, and Livira—now sole owner of the book she had started writing centuries before—hadn’t time to turn its power on him. Gleaming steel scythed the air. She lacked the speed or skill to avoid it.

“Livira!” Yute’s cry and Kerrol’s roar.

The scimitar cut through her, and the warrior, expecting resistance, lost balance, misstepped at the edge of the dais, and fell comically with a yell of surprise.

Livira still held her book despite the fact that she was, once again, a ghost. She met Yute’s gaze. No other present could see her, perhaps no other in this world outside the assistants in the library. It had been Livira herself who had shown Evar how in this state the bonds of gravity no longer held sway. She had taught him to fly. It had been Yute’s daughter, Yolanda, who had shown Livira there were new directions other than up and down, to move in. Other bonds to break. Yolanda had moved them in time.

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