My grandmother gave me an old book with no title, and when I opened it, the words woke up and the room vanished.
Grandma kept shelves of old books in every room, their pages the colour of tea and their spines soft with age. I loved the way they smelled, like firelight and rain and long afternoons. But the book she handed me that day was unlike any of them.
It was black leather, cold under my fingers, with strange symbols pressed into the cover. There was no title, no author, not even a scratch where a name might have been. It looked ancient. It also looked as if it had only just been waiting for me.
"This is for you," Grandma said, and her smile was small and secret. "But only open it when you are ready."
Ready for what? I wanted to ask, but she had already turned away.
The moment she left the room, I sat down on the rug and opened the book.
The page inside was covered in neat lines of writing, but before I could read the first sentence, the letters trembled. The curtain behind me stirred, though the window was shut. Then the words lifted from the paper one by one, glowing gold in the air like sparks.
I jerked back, heart thudding. A single letter spun past my nose. Then another. Then all of them broke free at once, whirling above the page in a storm of shining symbols.
The floor vanished beneath me.
I fell through a rush of light and sound and landed hard on a path made of twisting lines. Around me rose mountains shaped from giant letters, and rivers streamed past in ribbons of ink. The sky above was full of drifting symbols, flickering like stars.
Before I could move, someone stepped out from behind a tower of stacked M’s and stopped right in front of me.
It was the figure from Grandma’s stories.
He looked at me as if he had been expecting me for years.
"Hello, young writer," he said quietly. "At last, you opened the book."