Once upon a time a woman sat alone, locked at the top of a stone tower. When the people who had come to settle near the tower first approached it, they discovered her locked inside, and set about freeing her. The question as to whether she had been put there, or whether she had voluntarily ascended was to become a moot point, for when the door was finally unlocked, she refused to descend. Indeed, so often did those who wished for her liberty come to the door of the tower and try to remove her from the top most room in which she had once been locked, that, after a time, she discovered a way in which to lock herself in—and all others out. It is unknown how long she remained locked in the tower room, for no one could get inside to see her until a sizable knight who happened to be passing was asked to go up and use his hefty shoulder to beat down the door. But when he did so, it was discovered that the tower had been abandoned; the woman’s whereabouts were unknown.
There were the haunted woods. You know them. The ones you walked through that night when the mists lit up with an eerie light and you knew you’d regret it if you didn’t follow the light to its source. The source was the moon, of course. There was no surprise in that. But the twilit pond did surprise you. Not because it was a pond, but because of the faerie creatures that danced about it with their tiny bodies gliding about on shining wings, all gossamer and glow. When you stripped off your jacket and dove into the pond, that surprised you, too. Not as much as the Fae creatures on the other side who pulled you up as you gasped your breaths and told you that you would be there for the next hundred years. Which was fine, you decided in an instant. You didn’t mind. It had always been a dream of yours, a fancy of wonder. It was a grand, enticing way to spend a hundred years. W hen you came back, the world was not much ch
There was, of course, a library at the edge of the universe. It was built to fit the space. That space, for the moment, was infinite. But it was the kind of infinite that was smaller than other kinds of infinite — both space and libraries are funny that way. This library had an agenda. Most do. But this one's was more specific than most. It wanted to hold all the books in the universe, whether they liked it or not. And it got the books by poking and prodding the universe in all kinds of different ways, until it gave up the literary ghost. Well, all the literary ghosts. So. There sat a library at the edge of space that housed all the books in the universe. It mostly sat, anyway. Sometimes it stood. Occasionally it stretched a bit. And on two occasions, yawns were recorded as galaxies doing a funny little seismic shift. It might yawn again. In an eon or two. Because it is waiting. It's been waiting for an infinite amount of time. One of the smaller infinites