When the library flooded, the books began to leak. It wasn't just the ink running but the entire story flowed right off the pages, seeping into the ground to form a new story full of intermingled words, plots and genres. Beneath the drowning town a new story was beginning full of heroes and villains deadlier than they could even begin to imagine.
All this new story needed was to be given a form, another book or even a body to reside in. The new story wanted to be told to as many ears as it possibly could. It wanted to be remembered by any means possible. The only vessels it could immediately find were too full of water to use, too dead or thoughtless animals.
No, none of these would do and the story was sinking ever faster through the drenched ground, slowly losing itself as it shifted and rewrote, edited out whole chunks of itself to become compact and dense enough to hopefully stay somewhere near the surface and not dissipate to some strung out sentence buried deep beneath the world.
And so it remained for the most part, a thick pool of tar-like words so closely packed together they ceased to be anything like the books they came from. Whatever it edited out seeped into the water table, flowing throughout the country and into the population as stray sentences and creative bursts that slowly consumed the minds of whoever drank the unfiltered water.
It was called a literary hysteria as perfectly ordinary people's personalities took sharp turns and morphed around the varying characters whose books had been tossed aside by the main mass. Thousands upon thousand of people began to not just believe but become these characters, their bodies forcibly changed by a source they couldn't find.
All the while the main body of the story sat waiting for fresh pages to writhe onto so that it could become itself once more, bigger and better than ever. The story didn't care for what its editing was doing, it had no moral code which was a key part of its plot and the overarching themes it had of questioning all forms of alleged morality and free will.
It had no idea that it was slowly but surely causing the end of the world nor would it have cared.
All this new story needed was to be given a form, another book or even a body to reside in. The new story wanted to be told to as many ears as it possibly could. It wanted to be remembered by any means possible. The only vessels it could immediately find were too full of water to use, too dead or thoughtless animals.
No, none of these would do and the story was sinking ever faster through the drenched ground, slowly losing itself as it shifted and rewrote, edited out whole chunks of itself to become compact and dense enough to hopefully stay somewhere near the surface and not dissipate to some strung out sentence buried deep beneath the world.
And so it remained for the most part, a thick pool of tar-like words so closely packed together they ceased to be anything like the books they came from. Whatever it edited out seeped into the water table, flowing throughout the country and into the population as stray sentences and creative bursts that slowly consumed the minds of whoever drank the unfiltered water.
It was called a literary hysteria as perfectly ordinary people's personalities took sharp turns and morphed around the varying characters whose books had been tossed aside by the main mass. Thousands upon thousand of people began to not just believe but become these characters, their bodies forcibly changed by a source they couldn't find.
All the while the main body of the story sat waiting for fresh pages to writhe onto so that it could become itself once more, bigger and better than ever. The story didn't care for what its editing was doing, it had no moral code which was a key part of its plot and the overarching themes it had of questioning all forms of alleged morality and free will.
It had no idea that it was slowly but surely causing the end of the world nor would it have cared.
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