Nicholas was not a naturally quiet person, but very few knew this, and he was not one of them.

"Say, Nick, have you always been so shy?" prodded Ava Dubois, editorial director at the Seattle branch of Will & Williamson Publications, betraying an interest in what he had to say that she only ever carried under a specific set of conditions.

Speak-EZ Bar and Lounge, five P.M., company of twelve. The bar bore none of the mystery or class its name implied, brimming with wrinkled white collars and the stale scent of dwindling deodorant and unfulfillment. Red pleather peeled from the seats, the dim lighting was more an effect of age than aesthetics, and the jukebox in the corner – entirely the wrong time period – only had one working song. Every ten or fifteen minutes, a new patron would rise with a quiet exerted groan to insert a coin, and "Sweet Georgia Brown" would whistle from the speakers.

There was a slight tilt to every table. The largest seated six, which gave rise to an inevitable divide on the third Friday of every month when Floor Seven gathered for happy hour. One table seated the employees with 401(k)s. The other, those they invited for politeness's sake, the way the older kids on the playground had allowed Nicholas to play a minor role in their games when he was young and loud enough to ask.

At his right sat the other editorial assistants, Conrad and Jane, leaning so close they looked like they were kissing from the right angle. Sometimes they were, and very noisily. To his left was Ken the intern, who did not seem to realize it was unusual to bring your best friend to an office outing as an intern, and said best friend, Connor. Nicholas had a feeling Connor knew but came anyway, because he was clearly in love with Ken. Then there was Ava, the only person at the table above the age of twenty-five. Nicholas couldn't place why she sat with them instead of pulling up a chair at the 401(k) table, except that she seemed to enjoy nosing into the lives of people young enough to be her children and looking down her long, narrow nose at their decisions. Probably because she didn't have any children of her own.

"Yes," Nicholas said, concise. She raised her beer and watched him over the misty glass, waiting for more. When she lowered it, there was pink all around the rim and a splotch of color missing from her pursed lips. Her brow took on a determined crease. He capitalized on her attention. "Do you remember that draft you told me you'd look over a while back? Do you have any notes for–"

Her focus shifted to Ken the intern with impressive speed. She said, like she'd been speaking with them all along, "And have you heard about the man from sales who got fired for disorderly conduct? Mary told me he faked partial paralysis so he could 'trip and fall' and peep under women's skirts several times a day. Surely there are better ways!"

Nicholas sighed.

"Legend," whispered Ken. Connor stepped on his foot. Ava didn't pick up on the interaction. Nicholas tended to catch things others did not; it came with the territory of being quiet, which came with the territory of being ignored.

He had lost his voice in much the same way he had lost his ability to walk for a short, blurry stretch when he was seven, after spending so many weeks halfway unconscious that his legs forgot their job. In a similar vein, and around the same time, those twin folds of tissue in his larynx had grown feeble. A voice had little use with no one around to listen. With help, his legs had remembered. Reticence, though, was a learned response, one he learned so well he assumed he'd always had it.

He devoted his memories of the first seven years of his life to his parents – their faces, their hands, their voices and how they lilted with inflections and accents – in a stubborn refusal to forget them. He didn't mind forgetting everything else. The version of him that spoke loudly and at length was as much a stranger to himself as to the coworkers at the table.

    Accepting his rejection, Nicholas tuned in to the pair at his right.

    "I just wanna..." Jane slurred, pushing back the sleeve of Conrad's blazer to pinch the back of his wrist. "I wanna peel your skin away and live inside it."

    She leaned so far forward her seat started to tip. Conrad caught her by the back of the chair, and if the splotchy red on her face was anything to go by, she liked that a lot. Or she was just drunk.

"Yeah?" said Conrad. His glasses fogged up. "Yeah, babe, wear me like a dress. That way we'll never be apart."

Nicholas turned back to Ava.

"I love women!" Ken was protesting with broad hands splayed over his chest. This, Nicholas could attest. Ken loved frequently and deeply. Just that morning, he had come back from his coffee run with two trays of drinks and hearts in his eyes, mooning over the barista who put a smiley next to his name. Nicholas had plucked his own cup from the tray and chosen to withhold that it also had a smile.

"We all know you love women," crowed Ava. "But do you like women?"

"I'm not gay!"

Something seemed to dawn on him. Shock, then terror.

"Good grief, I'm not saying you're gay."

"I like women, and I'm gay," said Connor.

Ava laughed, shrill and toothy. "I've heard the two of you go on. If there's one thing gay men and straight men have in common, it's that they hate women."

She plunged into a long-winded tirade about men and women and the way men viewed women. It was surprisingly insightful, but Ken wasn't listening.

He sat unusually still, mouth parted like a screencap of low-budget horror. Slowly, movement returned to his face. A furrowed eyebrow, a shake of his head – denial. Twisting rage that drained into a wide-eyed plea directed at no one in particular. Ken went through what had been, for Nicholas, years of self-discovery in a matter of minutes. Before he could move to the next stage, he flinched as if he'd been struck, turning to Connor with a fishlike expression.

"You're gay?" he asked hollowly.

"Oh, did– did you not know?"

Nicholas watched their lives change with mingled amusement and intrigue, long-since acquainted with the feeling of sitting at the very edge of something big, an observer just outside of its periphery. Ava was still ranting, oblivious.

Ken skipped over depression entirely, diving headfirst into acceptance. "Wanna date me?"

"Dude. Yeah."

Nicholas drifted back, behind his eyes, away from the passion spilling over onto his seat from both sides. If he squinted, there was something beautiful here. A sudden, life-altering awareness, a cyclone of confusion and realization, all at once slowed down, broken into digestible pieces by the person who'd been there all along. Nicholas liked that. He could work with that.

Reserved as he was at face value, his mind was rarely quiet. It was something a starving artist would say, the kind he would talk shit on if he were loud and a hypocrite.

Color bloomed on the backs of his eyelids. He let them shutter just long enough to get a clear image: rich greens and deep gray-browns, choppy rays of sun jutting between ancient leaves; the frontier between kingdoms, where his protagonist looked into the eyes of a man he'd once hated and thought: He's right, I can do this. I don't have a choice.

Nicholas liked that a lot.

"Excuse me," he said, abruptly rising to his feet. "I'll have to get going, now. Have a good night."

One half-hearted hum from Ava was all the response he got.

Jammed between his desk and his bed, with a reheated serving of pinakbet tagalog filling the only clear desk space and a steaming bowl of rice perched dubiously on one arm of his chair, Nicholas pried open his laptop. It whirred and clicked for an entire minute. He feared this might be the night it gave out, but it crawled up from its grave, quivering to life and emanating heat.

An unnamed folder at the top right corner of his desktop held four years of nights like these. Nicholas had come home to this same manila icon since he was seventeen. It had changed more than him. Even after he'd written the final chapter, he couldn't stop tweaking, revising, sometimes altogether rewriting.

Like he was now. By the time the idea bulging from his skull had turned into words on a screen that he was happy with, there was a throbbing pain around his eyes even though the brightness of his display couldn't get any lower. His pinakbet was unfinished and cold. It hadn't been right, anyway. It was his fifth time, now, trying to make it the way his mom had. He regretted starting so late, when the taste was no longer fresh in his memory.

Nicholas squinted at the time. Nearly three in the morning. He wondered whether his coworkers had sobered up before driving home.

He'd meant to study tonight. From the clutter on his desk, he picked out a book on intermediate Portuguese. He was blinking back sleep a few lines in.

"Not tonight," he muttered, conceding. "Right. Okay."

He rubbed the ache above his eyes and tried not to feel irritated. But he couldn't cook Filipino food and he couldn't make time to learn Portuguese, and all he had left of his parents was a dwindling savings account and the features glaring at him from a black computer screen. His laptop had died.

Brown skin from dad, soft cheeks and hooded eyes from mom; a wide, flat nose from the both of them, and hair that fell somewhere between his coils and her pin-straight. Maybe this was just another thing he was destined to live on the outskirts of. Nicholas shut the laptop and noticed behind it the small, unframed photo on the windowsill of his foster family smiling around him. It was so bleached by the sun, his skin tone matched theirs. Real fucking poetic.

An unanswered text was the only notification on his phone. It wasn't too late to reply, only a day or two. He glanced at it again.

Hey Nicky, been a while since

we heard from you. We

miss you. Get in touch when

you can, and let us know if

you ever need anything.

    It wasn't that Nicholas had anything against Uncle Sam, who wasn't really his uncle anymore, or his wife and children.

    But there had always been, since the day Nicholas was transferred from his first foster home to live with his ex-uncle, an air of moral obligation that even a nine-year-old could sense. After all, out of the five people in his parents' car when a drunk driver turned it into a hunk of scrap metal, Nicholas and Samuel were the only ones who'd made it out alive.

Nicholas had lost his parents and his only aunt. Samuel had lost his wife and in-laws. They were no longer related. Yet two years post-incident, when Samuel had recovered enough to take on a new burden, he'd tracked Nicholas down and moved him from Washington to Montana. Survivor's guilt, maybe. If he noticed that Nicholas was different these days, quieter, he probably attributed it to maturity or trauma.

    In time, Uncle Sam had remarried and fathered kids of his own. His family had never failed to take care of Nicholas. They had been and still were very kind. They weren't his, though.

    He typed out a short, noncommittal response before bed.

    The bus stop across from his childhood library was only three blocks south of Will & Williamson. It was this convenience, not nostalgia or recognition, that had reintroduced Nicholas to Citlalli Aguilera.

    He had yet to come and go without seeing her. If she wasn't hunched on a stool behind the counter scanning books in trembling fingers, she was hobbling between the shelves with a hand bracing her lower back. No matter where she was, she had an unnerving way of noticing him first.

She turned away from the prehistoric desktop's zoomed-in registry as he entered, peering owlishly at him through one brown eye while the other drifted lazily, clouded with cataracts. Her grin when she saw him was toothy, revealing several missing molars. Why she still worked at her age was beyond him.

Whatever the reason, he was grateful.

"Three weeks overdue," she chided before he'd stepped fully past the sensors. Straight to the point, as always.

He piled three books onto the counter before her with his most charming smile. "Ah, but all will be forgiven, hm?"

"There is a late fee, compounded per day."

"Oh," Nicholas said solemnly, casting his eyes down to the stack. Slowly, he raised his gaze, pleading through his lashes. "Surely you can make an exception for the starving artist who held on with innocent hands, naively unaware of this fee. Some mercy for this pobrecito?"

She leveled him with a narrow stare. "Did you translate that on your way in?"

"Would you prefer Portuguese?" Elbows propped over the books, Nicholas clasped his hands. "Please, Cici, for your coitadinho–"

She pulled the books out from under him. His elbows would probably bruise, but it was worth it when she said, "This is the last time. Do you feel good about the three dollars you steal from a dying public institution?"

"I feel so ashamed," Nicholas said, head bowed woefully to hide his smile. That ploy only worked about every third time.

Cici was smiling, too, ochre skin pulling taut and terribly fond over high cheekbones. "How did you find my recommendation?"

She dipped her chin toward the faded cover topping the pile. Act of False Faith, a short history on the forceful conversion of the Maya to Catholicism at the hand of Spanish Fransciscan Diego de Landa. At its heart was his notorious auto-de-fe, the bonfire burning of Yucatec canvases deemed demonic, and what it destroyed.

"Severely vexing," said Nicholas.

It wasn't the only book of its sort Cici had slid his way. She had a deeply-vested interest in massacred history: its motivations, its outcomes. The first title she ever recommended to him, back when he was six and could barely read, let alone understand its significance, had spotlit the Aztec codices destroyed by Itzcoatl. Back then, her diatribes were the best thing about library visits even though he'd struggled with her accent, and he had responded passionately in kind without knowing what he was talking about. He loved to listen to her still, though he was self-effacing with his opinions nowadays.

"Come, come see," she said, rising with a sound like snapping twigs. "We have new stock. Take your pick: Communist regimes or the Holocaust?"

"I am...very uncomfortable with this question."

"Book burnings, cariño, we're talking about book burnings. Suppression of dissent, control of information. I have two new titles."

"You could have specified, I think."

It was very possible that the sole reason she continued working was to sneak her passion into inventory orders and nudge patrons toward her picks. Maybe she felt a sense of duty, not just to her Aztec blood but to the words destroyed during the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the Spanish Inquisition, the stories left behind by colonial Africa and indigenous assimilation.

"History cannot be undone," she said on their way back to the counter, clutching a volume on Nazi book burnings. She either didn't realize or didn't care that she repeated this often. "Only destroyed and rewritten."

When the book was checked out (with a promise of timely return), she added, as an afterthought, "Oh, I finally looked over that story of yours."

Nicholas had been turning to leave. He did a sharp ninety degrees to lean across the counter on his forearms, startling her back a few inches. "Did you really? That's great! That's– what did you think? Did you read it all? How did you feel about Elias, I'm worried I rushed their relationship–"

"Take pity on these old ears. I can only process one thing at a time," Cici groused, though something knowing flickered in her paper-thin smile, faintly endeared.

That was a blatant lie. He apologized nonetheless, embarrassed by his outburst. Someone in the library was glaring at him, he could feel it, and he apologized to them, too, in his head. "Just. What did you think?"

"I thought it was good," she said. Nicholas swelled. "And that you could do much better."

Like a balloon with an unseen hole bitten through its neck, he deflated before he'd gotten the chance to fill. "It feels incomplete?"

"I do hope publishing is not on your agenda."

Nicholas eased off the counter. His eyes averted to the wide chalkboard near the entrance covered in markings, denser with scribbles near the bottom where more kids could reach. He didn't say that he wanted to publish his first novel as soon as possible, but she must have seen it anyway.

"You have what, twenty-one years? No rushing."

Nicholas bit his tongue. What else am I supposed to do? How long should I wait to be at the center of something?

That was the only reason he'd done any of this. He'd gotten a degree in English even though he couldn't stand the sorts of people that studied English, he'd thrown short stories at every local journal that might look at them, he'd interned and then worked under Ava fucking Dubois, all to get his foot in the door. And he'd always had this idea that the only obstacle was him and his nonexistent charisma, but if it was his writing – well, then–

"Nicholas," said Cici. "Calm down. You are more than talented enough to fix it."

She procured from somewhere beneath the counter the binder he'd given her some months ago. The paper inside was covered in red ink and crooked highlights. "The story is wonderful. But the world you've created feels very distant."

  "...It's a fantasy," said Nicholas.

"And as the reader, I should feel so immersed in that fantasy that when I close the book I have to shake myself awake," said Cici. "Your setting and its magic are so far away, I wondered if you were having trouble visualizing them yourself. The story doesn't even have a name."

Nicholas didn't trust himself to speak without coming off defensive – as if he couldn't visualize his own world! – so he said nothing at all.

"I got this feeling, the further I read, that you do not know your characters very well."

His fingers twitched. He had powerpoints upon powerpoints about his characters. He had spreadsheets.

"What motivated their actions? Adrian ran away from his coronation, yes, he was not ready to be king, okay, but where did that sense of incompetence come from? How did it win out over the obligation he clearly feels toward his people? And your villain, Rayan, I'm not sure I've ever read a character so flat– does he have a reason for starting a war, or is he just bored? You need to get closer, mijo."

Nicholas had expected Cici's brand of brutal honesty. He had hoped for it. That didn't make it go down any easier.

"Alright." Nodding shallowly, he stacked the new rental on top of the binder. He was about to pull both away when another, bigger book was placed atop the first.

It looked and smelled centuries old. Its leather cover was blank and lifting up at the corners, bound front-to-back with a thin strap that wrapped around it several times. The pages inside had yellowed with age. They didn't sit entirely flat, curving against one another. Nicholas unwound the binding and found that they were empty. He looked up, bemused.

"A new medium might inspire you," said Cici. "There's no limit to what you may find when forced to translate your own words."

"You want me to put my story here?"

"If that is how you choose to use it," she said cryptically.

Nicholas trailed his fingers between two pages. They were surprisingly sturdy. He did it again, just to feel their texture. Rewriting one hundred ten thousand words by hand sounded like his personal hell on earth, but...he didn't want to let go of this journal, either.

"I wouldn't know where to start," he admitted.

Her smile took on the mischief of someone much younger. "How about 'Once upon a time?'"

Nicholas scrunched up his nose. "It isn't a fairytale."

"I don't see why not." She offered him a pencil. He took it, if only because his fingers itched to mark the page. They tingled, restless. He wrote in his best cursive.

There were no revelations, no light bulbs flickering on. But he loved how the pencil felt against the grainy paper.

"Are you going to say I should finish with 'The End,' too?"

"You've come this far, you might as well."

Nicholas kept toying with the pages, feeling the small gaps between them. He tested the smoothness of the spine beneath the pad of his thumb. "Thank you," he murmured. The journal was beautiful. He had half a mind to push it back toward her, if he wasn't so selfishly drawn to it. "For the recommendation, and for the notes, and for the gift."

She waved a dismissive hand. Kind crow's feet folded deep into her skin. "Off with you, now."

Nicholas didn't touch the journal for days.

Well, that wasn't true. He touched it plenty, couldn't seem to help himself – he skimmed his hand along the binding in passing, propped his wrist on the cover in the hours he worked unpaid overtime. But he hadn't written in it again. He still didn't know how he could use it.

Five days a week, eight hours a day, he sat in his unfortunately-placed cubicle and tried to work beneath the palpable tension cast from either side by Conrad and Jane, who were back to masquerading as acquaintances now that they were sober. Behind him, Ken swiveled his chair around every hour to show off borderline-NSFW pictures of his weekend tryst with his new boyfriend. And from her office in the corner, Ava continued to be conveniently distracted whenever Nicholas brought up the short excerpt she had promised to review.

Then he returned home, and he had all of Citlalli's notes to look over and sixty-thousand words worth of cuts to suggest on an impossibly thick manuscript by the end of the week. The journal would have to wait.

It was half-past ten on Friday when he sent in his edits. Yawning, he reached blindly for his binder and instead wrapped his hand around an unfortunate series of events: his forearm bumped his water bottle, an attempt to catch it somehow made it go down harder, and the precariously seated cap popped easily away. He hissed a curse and scrambled as water seeped through the pages, smearing the ink.

The damage wasn't extensive. Just a slow-growing patch at one edge that leached through the first several pages, ruining notes he had already gone through. There was no reason for his frustration to boil over, except that it had been bubbling at the brim for the last week and Nicholas was tired.

    "Shit," he muttered as his nose started to sting. He didn't cry often, and certainly not over small inconveniences. If that was the case, he'd never stop. "Shit, God."

    He scrubbed his sleeve under his nose and tried to push away from his desk, only to be reminded that there was hardly enough room between his desk and his bed for a chair in the first place. For a second, he was stuck, before he ripped himself out of the space and stumbled to his feet with another shout of, "Shit! It's fine, it's fine."

    Relax.

    Unwittingly, he reached for the journal. The cool leather was soothing to the touch; he grounded himself in its crinkled pages. Relax.

    He settled on his bed before he could think too hard about it, turned on the yellow lamp on the stack of organizers he called his bedside, and began to draw.

    It had been a while. His sketchbooks, gifts from Samuel's wife, sat untouched among the mess of his desk. He didn't have time for them, not if he was going to keep up with his job and publish before he turned twenty-four.

    He could allow himself one break, though. Something about the vibrations when his pencil dragged along the paper soothed him like a balm, like the Vicks VapoRub his dad used to massage over his chest when he was sick.

    He didn't pay much mind to what he was drawing or how much time he allowed to trickle by. An ethereal woman took shape, wreathed in darkness and blurry with anguish, reaching for a small, broken body at the bank of a steaming pond. The Lovers, he scrawled in the corner, right before his pencil slipped from his grasp and he succumbed to sleep.

    He told himself it would only be that night, but he rolled over Saturday morning and buried himself in the journal. A new page came together like a connect-the-dots game, two figures floating side-by-side in a smudgy night sky like constellations. The same woman, this time made of stars, drifted with her lover. It didn't mean anything, but Nicholas liked it.

    His next drawing took up two sheets and came from four years of imagining. A sweeping stone building cradled in a valley, abandoned and overgrown yet still so grand it could have been a castle. He labeled it Halcifer School of Magic, then scribbled a history into the empty spaces.  He lifted his head late into the night with an aching neck.

    On Sunday, he sketched rolling hills dotted by small, mossy homes. Primordial trees blanketed the landscape, thick with vines and flowers and life. A grazing beast here, a magical garden there, all leading toward a palace on a hill nestled between a massive rock arch and a waterfall that cast mist across its entrance. He titled this place Interra, straight from the pages of his novel.

    He couldn't stop. He got home from work and made instant pancit canton and hovered over the journal with his fork hanging from his mouth. Over three nights, he reimagined Caldora, kingdom of mages. Four more, and he had sketched out every major character, crowded by bullet-list personalities and backstories. He moved on to minor characters, then invented beasts, then imaginary settings, and when he ran out of those, he started on the story.

    It came to life like the old manga overfilling his shelves. Panels of action gathered on the pages with bubbles of dialogue and snippets of narration, presenting the most important plot points in chronological order. He drew fight scenes and first kisses, speeches and magic spells. How's this for visualizing? he mused.

    When he showed Cici, all she did was laugh and whisper-yell, "Marvelous!"

    Days bled into weeks bled into months. In the spare hours around work, Nicholas returned always to his journal.

    It was another Floor Seven Friday when he practically burst through his apartment door, restless after the mere hour he'd lasted out with his coworkers. He kicked off his shoes and squeezed onto his chair with his work bag still slung over his shoulder. He hadn't had a sip to drink, but he was tipsy with excitement.

    He turned past his most recent page, pausing to admire the image of his villain hanging several feet from the floor in a listless arch, gouged through the chest by a thick, spearlike stalk.

    His next drawing would be the last.

    He'd been distracted all day at work, debating which scene of the resolution he wanted to realize. He landed on this: Adrian, his hero, wrapped in his lover's arms on a palace balcony, stories above a joyous celebration, his rightful crown draped over his forehead.

    For the sake of the joke, he wrote beneath it, The End. He looked proudly down at his work. He had really finished.

    I really finished.

    His smile slipped in increments as he studied those final words.

It occurred to him, with his pencil still lingering over the period, that he didn't feel any closer to the smiling faces on the page than he had the day he received the journal.

He didn't get time to dwell on it.

The moment he let the pencil fall, an invisible force yanked Nicholas' hands flat over the open pages. He was allowed a quarter-second of alarm, of rounding eyes and a cut-off gasp, before a feeling like pressing your palm to the mouth of a vacuum hose sucked him to the desk. Nicholas tried to scream and found his mouth submerged in– submerged in the book. He was choking, yellow-beige obscuring his vision as his face rapidly sank and his body curled forward, squeezing. Somewhere in the midst of warring confusion and panic, he reached a shocking point of clarity – either he was dreaming, or he was going to die. He would wake up slumped over his desk, drooling on the pages, or he would be crushed beneath this impossible pressure and disappear inside them.

Everything stopped, and for an instant he was suspended in nothing.

Then he hurtled forward. Or maybe he was stuck in place, and everything was hurtling past him. Pencil scratches curved around every inch of his view at breakneck speed– a lover's death at the shore of a pond– darlings written in the stars– a castle of a school– a lush landscape, the first burst of color, green. He felt the brush of a leaf against his cheek and tried again to shout, voiceless. Images rushed by too fast to process, each more material than the last. Suddenly there was fire– no, pain, scorching his abdomen, forcing his eyes shut and dragging a haggard scream from the depths of his chest. It hurt so badly, he didn't even notice that the sound made it out of his throat, or that the hurtling had stopped, or that his knees and palms were scraping harsh stone.

Nicholas coughed and tasted iron. There were startled voices somewhere past the ringing in his ears, maybe far away, maybe right on top of him. He blinked and got a bleary glimpse of a city that was most certainly not Seattle. Under any other circumstance, it might have been familiar. As it was, that short glimpse was all he got before the pain reached a crest and his vision went black.

Rough stone. Chilly air against hot skin – not burning, but fevered. The smell of earth and rain and something stale, a mustiness that tickled his nose. Nicholas slowly blinked away the crust sticking his eyes together and saw dark steel wheels– no, disks– no, eyes, glaring down at him. Gray eyes, cold as metal. He knew those eyes, how did he know them?

"Not yet." The mouth beneath the eyes was moving; the voice that came out was just as crisp. Everything about the face was impossibly familiar. Cool fingers pushed Nicholas' eyes shut, something touched his nose, and he slept.