With a cold and weighted sigh, the writer laid his weary pen aside. One by one he packed up his outlines and sketches, sorting them all into folders and files, and once the desk in front of him was clear he stacked them all up and locked them in a cabinet where he would no longer be forced to look at them. What little was written on his computer he saved, then he folded the laptop upon itself and sat, leaning his head on his hands.

For a moment he reflected on all he had just locked away. They were fragments. Unfinished bits and pieces. A beginning here, there a climax. More often still, a lone ending without a story and a list of characters forever waiting to live. He pitied those characters, stuck eternally between invention and existence. Each desperate half-existence was another regret for him and yet, somehow, he only ever seemed capable of repeating this wretched stalemate with every new attempt.

Each new beginning was made with the best intentions. The story was there in his head, all laid out, but each time he began to write it slipped away behind the gossamer curtain of his subconscious, leaving only vague ideas and half-formed plots. He would labour for days before starting again, with fresh intent and renewed vigour, inevitably to the same pathetic end.

It wasn't always like this.

A time long past came to mind like a long-lost remembrance of a golden age. It was only a few years back, just barely out of reach. It was a time dominated by page after page of beautiful prose, by full novels that took only a month, and by characters so alive that at times they seemed to dictate their own stories to him. What had changed it all?

The answer took him only a moment.

It was time. Years had gone by. Years of characters full of spirit living life-changing adventures in beautiful new worlds, all of it his creation, as he watched from beyond the unbreakable pane of reality. He was stuck, immobile, watching them play out the parts he designed for them perfectly and yet unable to take part in such epic fantasies himself. Perhaps the years of watching had brought with them an incurable languor. He wondered if god ever grew bored with the universe. Was he doomed, then? Unable to write until he had lived his own fantastic adventure, something which the cage of stark reality made clearly impossible?

Perhaps not.

The writer looked to his pen. He did not need it. His computer stayed dark, closed, and his files stayed stored away. He simply closed his eyes, and leaned back in his chair. He would make his own world. His own self. A place where he could live any adventure, follow any path his heart desired.

It was then, tapping into magicks unknown and ancient, that the writer began to dream.