The Mate They Threw Away
I stood before it for a moment with my hands at my sides, looking at the dark, worn cover, the spine that had no title, the pages whose edges had a faint luminescence that might have been age or might have been something else entirely.
Then I picked it up.
The world ended.
That is the only way I can describe it, not darkness, not pain, not a simple sensation, but the total and violent ending of the world I had been standing in one moment before and my simultaneous arrival in every other world that had ever been or could have been. Images. Thousands of them. Tens of thousands. Wars I had no name for, fought by people whose faces I’d never seen, on landscapes that didn’t match any geography I