Alice’s tears had long dried up, she however, had not moved at all from the place she had broken down. How much time had passed, she could not hope to know, her depressive stupor partly by choice, and partially unwanted, like some kind of disease. She wanted to get up. The cold, wet, morning dirt couldn’t be good for her. She desperately wanted to live, to find the thing that would grant her life meaning. But without that reason to face reality, the same reality that had mercilessly kicked her down from the heights of happiness to the depths of despair, standing felt as difficult as running without legs. Alice didn’t want to die, but she found no reason not to, then she came to a thought. Perhaps dying was just her way of avoiding reality, the easy way out. But would she enjoy living her life for the difficulty? And no matter how supposedly ‘easy’ this was, it was still challenging, as the gaping maw of death was something few could stare into and yet still throw themselves in willingly. And once she peered into death’s cold uncaring eyes, Alice was scared. She was more scared than she could ever be of anything in life. She refused to die, not because she had some sort of hope or goal for the future, but because as a living creature, she was born to fear the uncaring abyss that wordlessly whispered that her death would be meaningless. Her story would end. And not one person would read it.

Flitting through hollow dreams and her aching reality, Alice found herself in a place of darkness, while this wasn’t too strange as her eyes were closed, the main thing that made this space odd was the closed book laying silently in the air. The gold pages of the book bound in ornately detailed silver leather had no title. Alice curiously walked up to the book and reached out a hand to open it. As if responding to her desire the book flipped itself open to some place around its center. Alice read through the black words imprinted onto the page in fancy looking calligraphy, the words told the story of Alice’s life. From her birth up until this exact moment, however, everything written about the events after this moment was written in a faint gray that was hardly readable on the pale gold pages, the gray words also seemed to wriggle along the pages and form more words, telling a different story each time. Except for one sentence. Written in a faded red. Alice died.

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Alice frantically flipped through more and more pages to try and figure out what was going on and there she read it again, in the same faded red twenty pages later Alice died. As Alice continued reading ahead she realized the faded letters told a story that was yet to come, she hadn’t died yet after all. With her fear and panic dying down, Alice decided to go back to before her story started. Going before her birth, Alice backtracked along her parents story, from their death, to Alice’s birth, then to the time her parents spent together when they were a couple newly in love. After this point though, the story split in two, one for each of her parents. Alice continued down her father’s story, starting from his time in the army all the way to his birth. After a few pages of her grandparents lives, there were simply blank pages, their entirety a dull grey colour, as the silky gold paper had been caked in forgotten time. Alice assumed this meant that, instead of the words being invisible due to their events being liable to change, the blank pages meant she didn’t have enough of a connection to their lives, after all all she new of her grandparents was a few odd stories here and there. Alice tried to capitalise on the wealth of information stored in the book and flipped ahead to her immediate future, all she could tell was that the amount of times that Alice died. Increased by a great amount.