Mona opened her book. The words about ancient seas began to tremble. The blank page at the end wasn’t empty—it was a mirror. In it, she saw the sorcerer: a lonely librarian who had grown jealous of the clouds’ freedom. He had trapped their rain inside a single unwritten sentence.
The cloud pointed a wispy, skeletal finger at her book. “That one.”
Every day, Mona climbed the highest rib of the whale-fossil and opened her book. It was a storybook, but every page was a desert. It spoke of oceans that had once kissed the shore, of rivers that sang. The last page was blank.
Mona stood in the downpour, laughing. Her book soaked through, the ink bleeding into beautiful, illegible rivers. The blank page was now a deep, impossible blue—the color of a sky that had finally learned to cry.