My name is Malkidian, the greatest wizard ever to sail through the pages of a spellbook. My robes are as black as oblivion, and my hat has feathers so dark that not even the deepest night can compare. My wand is a sharp quill, and not just any quill, oh no! It is the Word-Absorbing Quill, capable of sucking the magic out of any story, turning pages blank and changing the most colorful tales into a letterless desert.
“Why do I do this?” you might ask. I, too, was once young—in the darkness of the book, of course—and I felt curious about stories. But stories are like seeds of untamed flowers: they grow in every direction without asking permission or paying tribute. They are a chaos of imagination, laughter, characters, and useless morals. And what is imagination without order? A jumble of voices that do not obey me. A nuisance. No, no, no. I like things clear: I want stories to kneel before me, for every word to answer my call. I want to be the owner of the ink itself.
So one day, I entered the Hell of Words, a world hidden between the crackling covers of an ancient spellbook. There, anything is possible: rivers are made of ink, mountains are dusty bindings, and there are creatures born from adjectives and verbs. And he is there, too—Azaroth, a demon with plum-colored eyes and a furry tail, who believes stories are sacred and should be shared without malice. Ugh! How naïve.
I had heard about that Azaroth and his unusual relationship with a magic spoon. A silly matter from the past, no doubt. But the important thing is that Azaroth protected the purity of stories. How irritating.
That morning, as the pages creaked, I set out on my mission. First, I had to cross the Floating Alphabet, a cloud of dancing letters that weave and unweave words. With my Word-Absorbing Quill, one quick move was enough to catch a few vowels and reduce them to a hollow hiss. The wind of the letter “X” tried to lash at me, but I destroyed it with a dry laugh. A nice place, perfect to begin my conquest.
After that, I reached a bridge made of ellipses. Tick, tock, tick, tock… What an irritating way to hold suspense! Stories love suspense, mystery, surprises. I love certainties: power and control in my hands. So I crossed out a couple of curious adjectives that jumped along the path. Yum! I savored them like bitter ink candies. Delicious.
Then I heard a little voice:
“Malkidian? Are you up to your old tricks again?”
It was Azaroth, floating among the pages, wearing a look that mixed surprise and courage. A demon with a hero’s calling. How ridiculous! Without losing my composure, I gave him a crooked smile.
“Oh, Azaroth, my dear…” I mocked. “I’ve come to redesign this story my way. How about we empty it out a bit? A tale with no laughter, no metaphors, no colors… An empty story! Isn’t it perfect?”
Azaroth shook his tail and looked at me with disapproval.
“Stories do not belong to you, Malkidian,” he said. “They belong to everyone who reads them.”
“Ha! Everyone… except me. What I want is for these stories to obey me. To be the only author, the master of the words.”
We kept going. Azaroth followed my trail, trying to save the sentences I erased. I remember the look of horror on a dancing flower metaphor when I reduced it to a dry phrase: “There are flowers.” Ha! No dance, no music, no magic. Just a handful of dull words. The metaphor whimpered and crumbled into gray dust. Azaroth, horrified, tried to save another poetic fragment: a sky of silk paper. “A sky of silk paper? Bah!” I reduced it to just “sky,” and that was that.
But Azaroth did not give up. The memory of what happened in the end still stings. We reached the Tower of Covers, where the heart of the story beats. If I emptied it, the entire narrative would become a perfect nothingness.
Then Azaroth tried to stop me with… stories! He began to tell adventures, jokes, verses. Each of his words shone and made the sentences I had dried up grow back again. I tried to cross them out, to absorb them with my quill, but these words weren’t locked on the page—they were free in the air, beating inside the imagination. My attempts were useless. I tripped over unruly adjectives, playful verbs pushed me around, and in the end, I had to flee. I jumped through a window and lost myself among clouds of torn paper.
Defeated? For now, yes. But I am Malkidian, and someday I will find a way to silence those voices. If I cannot steal the written words, I will try to convince creatures to stop telling them. Because imagination is strong, but it can also be forgotten. And when there is no one left to tell stories, the inkwell will truly be empty… and I will smile.