Pick up where a stranger left off

The heat came early that morning, settling over Tassirin like a hand pressed flat against the city's back. By the time Farida had hauled her cart to its usual spot between the spice merchant and the blind calligrapher, the air above the sandstone was already shimmering, thick and slow. She wiped her brow with the hem of her sleeve and squinted down the long throat of the market street. Stalls were opening like flowers. Awnings unfurling, copper pots catching the light, the first sweet threads of incense reaching out to tangle with the smell of bread and donkey sweat. Somewhere a boy was singing for coins, his voice high and clear above the clatter of shutters.

Farida uncovered her wares. Dozens of small glass jars, no two quite alike, each stoppered with wax and arranged in rows on a cloth of faded indigo. Some held an amber liquid that shifted when you tilted them, viscous like honey. Others were darker, nearly opaque, or pale as watered milk. A few glowed faintly, though that was a trick of the early light, or so she told the tourists. Every jar bore a handwritten label. First kiss, rooftop, midsummer. Mother's song, half-remembered. The sound of rain on a tent. Memories, harvested and bottled and ready to be someone else's for the right price.

It was honest work, mostly. The harvesters brought her stock each week in wooden crates lined with straw, and she never asked where they sourced it. Some sellers did. Some made a point of knowing every name, every story, and charged double for the tragedy. Farida preferred not to know. A memory was just a thing, she told herself, light as perfume. You smelled it, and then it was gone. Leaving only the faint aftertaste of a meal. She had sold hundreds of them. She had never once been tempted to open one herself.

Rynn was the kind of child who would bloody his own nose pressing it against the glass to get a better look at the Mages at work. He did so, quietly, as if the House of Magi, the building itself, could feel pain. Perhaps it did.

The building was holy to him. The pinnacle of Magic. The entry-key to the House was mastery of the Arcane. This Arcane, shrouded in mystery, subject to speculation, is known to the general populace only by hearsay: wizened men turning themselves into children, women with power to fashion silk into gold,

The House was where he came across this dusty, unmarked tome, yellowing and brittle at the edges. The book was sacred to him. A Catalyst, a bearer of spell. He knew he was in the wrong for sneaking in, stealing it, and running out. But he couldn't just return it, that would be...wrong. It was dusty when he found it, and if he never took it, perhaps when he died it would have been dusty still. And as such, Rynn smuggled it in his bag. His parents were gone for the week. He had the house all alone to himself to read. No one needed to know.

At night, by candlelight, he tried to read the text. He couldn't. Such was the barrier of entry to magic: you are either born with it, or you must give something to read it. Rynn was a commoner in every sense of the word. No one, ever, in his family, had been blessed with the Arcane. The words either danced, vanished, or stung Rynn's hands when he tried to turn the pages.

Enraged at himself, and the book, Rynn took his candle, and set the pages aflame. For good measure, once the flames died he hurled it out the window, into the river his fishermen parents chose to make their living by.

And then, he slept soundly.

The morning came, and it hadn't burnt. It had returned, but better! The pages were clean and white, the leather binding's title was made clear (Rynn still couldn't read it), and it floated. Mid-air. And pulsated blue strobe lights. Rynn stared at it for a long time, before tucking it inside his cabinet.

The next day came, and when Rynn awakened and opened the closet, it was no longer a tome. White filaments had emerged from the pages, tendrils snaking, spreading outward, searching, scanning. Rynn slammed the closet, pushed his bed against it, and weighed the pros and cons of calling the Mages and going to jail versus whatever was in there.

Through the cracks of the cabinet, Rynn would sneak peeks. It grew blue threads, like veins, branching outward to his clothes, one branch snaking outside to the river. And with each passing day, it seemed to take form. Sometimes avian, sometimes humanoid, always, always, smelling of sea salt.

Rynn's dreams began to change, to visions of inside the House. Rooms not open to the public. Things it wanted Rynn to see. In them, a low, airy voice rang out:

"You have come to me, and I now come to you."

By week's end, it had forced its way out of the closet. It was no longer content with merely floating, no, it grew a body that morphed to mimic whatever it gazed at with its filaments: birds, Rynn, the stray animals outside the house. Its form of white filament and river-water tapped against everything inside, sometimes high and shrill, sometimes low and harsh. Rynn, trapped inside lest he open the world and let the world see what he had done, eyed the glowing blue core of it with fear.

The light blinked, and Rynn saw the world with new eyes: his house crumbling down, the letters written across the tome's new body reassembling and forming imperatives:

Trust me. Trust no one but me. Use me. Know me.

It inched closer to Rynn, before resting a tendril upon his forehead.

Become my power. Shape me. Form me.

Then the world faded to black.

Love me.

The new week had started. The parents came home. Rynn awoke to everything in his house looking back to normal.

There was a new "tome" inside his closet, nice and clean.

Rynn stared.

It stared back.

In the paper it was written, "Dear reader!! I know that reading this will feel like it is a story, but I am telling absolutely truth. You might have watched a cartoon series in which there are five great nations. Very few people know that those five great Shinobi nations actually exist in our world." Near the parchment that you opened it is another parchment, in which the hidden locations of the Ninja Shinobi Nations myself wrote it. In our world these nations are peaceful and friendly with each other now. The Orochimaru who was evil, he is changed by a ten year's old girl little by little. I saw it by my own eyes, and was stunned by it, so was Orochimaru when the girl hugged him. Now, nobody fears of nobody, just laughters and joys. Visit the Ninja world sometime dear reader!! You will love it being there.