The air had reached a strange silence in the room. Elara let it fill her lungs, the irony of it beating in her heart. Her eyes stayed fixated on the stack of paper wrapped in crimson cloth, wondering exactly why some strands of thread were like splintering bone jutting out of bruised skin. A book. Elara had never seen something…something like this. The lamp cast a jaundiced light across the desk, illuminating a somber ballet of dust motes. The dust motes didn’t settle down on the cover, instead they pirouetted gracefully in midair, using it as their stage. The air seemed to poke at Elara’s skin, beckoning her to tell someone. Run and tell someone that the only thing forbidden was somehow on her desk. But she found some strange calm to it. The strange calm pulled her down onto her chair. She refused to move, only her eyes occasionally darted side to side, knowing the consequences she could face. She listened to the way the atmosphere surged and receded like a tidal wave preparing for a strike. In the silence, she imagined the rhythmic tap-tap of the dust motes’ feet hitting the cover before they leaped back into their gravity-defying dance. For the first time in her life, Elara wasn't afraid of the dark; she was captivated by the weight of the silence it carried. Elara didn’t see a book—but a floral cemetery bound in cloth. She traced the pages with her fingers, wondering how many thousand sun-drinking saplings had been torn out—how many choruses of birdsong had been silenced just to satisfy the book’s hunger for ink—a dark liquid that seemed to pour onto the pages with its ego. How many eyes had crossed the words on the pages? How many times had this book seen ink? Elara realised this book wasn’t just a book. It was a thought that no other could bear, but only Elara could hear the echoes in the book, the echoes of birdsong that would have once dominated the treetops. The dust motes weren’t doing a ballet. They were trying to pull out the words, trying to twist them into something acceptable. But Elara knew that wasn’t right.
