The intricate filigree twisted and turned, meticulously crafted in gold leaf, its form glowing—especially under the sunlight streaming through the leaded glass above her chamber’s castellated walls. It shimmered with visual richness that only the literate few could fail to see, their minds bogged down by lifeless, black letters formed into names for all things, which, lacking life, existed only in a flat, crisp dimension. He, however, was alive, rising from the dry parchment prison.
Desiderata's moist eyes performed their non-verbal task, sending the image before her into her brain's hungry cortex, racing through her petite frame's pulsing veins with every heartbeat, his face finding refuge within the rushing blood cells. She couldn't read the word whose capital letter seemed to house and camouflage him, but she felt his charm, his talismanic presence enshrined in precious sprouts upon an apparent forest agleam, flattened by the quill's touch. He might be a lord—'my lord,' she silently gasped, then closed the tome given to her by the priest, a gift held in trust from her betrothed, a man she had yet to see.
'How careless of him, his family, their trusted cleric, to tempt me so,' she mused, revisiting him nightly on the vellum pages.
This evening would be especially revealing—what, and to whom, was unknowable to her or anyone in her tiny kingdom. As she lifted the wooden cover, richly decorated in marquetry, he appeared, now inhabiting every swirling gilded capital form, and she was certain, speaking, too quietly for the ear but clear to her eye. His lips moved slowly, deliberately, miming—like the many dumb shows she knew as a child—a hopeless, futile message where soundless words were meaningless to her untrained, illiterate eye.
A noise in the corridor beyond her locked doors... the weighty wood enclosing his pages seemed an echo of the authorless sound, falling upon the nearly silent, verbalizing figure, now animatedly gesturing in the page-land to which it was open.
‘Father, or nursemaid, pounding?’ she wondered. They mustn't discover she had invaded the dowry cabinet, whose key the priest had weakly given her, granting access to the splendid treasure awaiting her, believed safely kept until the nuptials. Then, in midday, all went dark, silent, utterly still; she couldn't feel her own heartbeat, as she should have, racing; not a sound or sight. She doubted her existence, casting out the thought as one empties a pail of water, along with the very pail.
Sadly, she had become, like all the others he had lovingly conjured... despite all the deep care and lavish gifts he had endowed her with... what use?! As his six-fingered hand ceased drumming upon his writing table, the pen now inkless, the paper slowly crumpled within a smothering twelve-digit grasp, and cast into the fireplace. Too dim to hint to the reader that he, the trapped homunculus, was warning her, pleading with her to free him before they both burned, alive. Snorting with contempt, he would begin afresh after a night's rest; night came to him as swiftly as to her. He prayed that night that his bookish world, its pages, would not burn before morning.