Stretched out in a hammock she designed herself, stitched with her very two hands, lying in the garden of her own making, in a pleasant grove she selected herself, hemlock trees standing sentinel around her, she allowed them to guard her. For now.

Reclining in a world wholly chosen by her, she was willfully lost among the bovine and the confused, the kinda lost that was akin to being found. She was at peace, calm from within, so calm that she actually felt the spume on her face though the sea was no where near her and yet she was near one; she lived by the sea, she didn't live by the sea.

A book in her hand, always, from the library no beast had built for her nor any comely huntsman, or snow was coming back from the dead, heroes were losing even in fiction. The library like most of her things was her own doing as was her way. She built it in parts, piece by piece but she did it, it was truly hers. Her hands had become raw, blistered, and bloodied but the fruits was hers just as the labor was, as rewarding and coldly delicious. Clearly loved by the books, the book in her hands made beautiful was making her more beautiful still.

Books offered her something people around her simply couldn't. In books in spite of being made up they were more real to her. Whilst everyone around her despite being real couldn't be more fake, truly worthy of make believe yet they neither made nor believed. It was rather unfortunate they surrounded her.

That she preferred characters in a book to them was what made her attractive, only she didn't know that.

She liked oscillating between real and the fictitious, she knew in her heart the cure for all, and everything. But logically she knew they would never...read. She couldn't care less about all the warring between her kind, they should celebrate not waste but that wasn't any of her business. All she wanted was to become an inkblot madness on dead trees. It was a done deal, people didn't want to be saved, she wouldn't bother either. There was another thing that made her such a delightful secret, a stark fact she possessed, a thought she cradled fiercely. What that little insight was, what she kept, what she had, what she was therein lies the rub and the mystery. What she was willing to tell, what she could impart was already forgotten but not forgiven. There are no happy endings in life, just endings. You'll never get what you want,ever. Unless it's a book so always yearn for a perfect book, where everyone dies at the end.

She shifted her legs, wiggled her toes, and turned another page. She kept the secret to her and for herself.