I have no title. Honestly, I have no idea where this came from. Do let me know if it makes some kind of sense to you. :)
***
Every night, he is young and fresh and whole. His mind is teeming with ideas, his pen flying across the parchment scroll on the desk. Once upon a time...
Every night he writes story upon story, until it seems that he must have written every story that ever was or ever will be. Yet his pen flies across the parchment unceasingly--it is always parchment, he does not know why it is always parchment that he uses--and from the depths of his being come new stories. There are princesses and dragons, there are first loves and first dates, there are gangsters and scientists and superheroes. Every story is different.
His steel tower is cold, almost sterile in the darkness. A lamp sits on his desk, and the moon shines bright and cold through the window facing the east. He pauses his writing for a moment to admire the window. It is really a lovely window, he muses to himself; it is made of cut glass and prisms, and shadowy rainbows dance across the floor of his steel tower. Prisms hang from the ceiling as well, and rainbows decorate the walls when the moon is not covered by clouds. He decided that his next story will have rainbows in it somewhere, and his pen dances across the page. The ink is thick and black, and it never smears. He wonders why it never smears.
He writes until the darkest hour--the moments just before dawn, when the moon is fading and the sun has yet to rise. The prisms hanging from the ceiling no longer cast their ghostly rainbows, the lamp at his desk dims of its own accord. His pen slows and the words cease to dance across the parchment--it is always parchment, why is it always old-fashioned parchment when everything else is shining and new--and the moon fades away as the sun slowly rises.
In that moment he remembers why it is that his pen has stilled, and the ornate window of prisms on the east wall is suddenly blindingly bright. It is like looking straight into the sun, only he cannot tear his gaze away from the terrible beauty as the window shines with the brilliance of a hundred thousand stars. The parchment at his left hand is warm, warm, warm, and all of a sudden it is bursting into flames because everything is too bright for it to bear.
And he is on fire too, he realizes, and he remembers again that every morning when the sun rises he must die again, and his stories must die with him, because somewhere, they have already been told. He is the keeper of dreams, and so he must rise to write again, for without him, there would be no stories. For now, though, he must burn as he and his stories are consumed by the flames. He knows that will rise from the ashes again like a phoenix at dusk, young and fresh and whole, his mind teeming with ideas. Every night, he knows, he writes every story that ever was.
