The Book

At the edge of a tangled woodland there stood an enchanted tower. In the top room of the tower there was a huge book, as tall as a full-grown man. The Wizard, who lived in that tower, wrote in the Book all the goings-on in the woods, and everything the creatures did, who dwelt therein.

Nothing, good or bad, happened that the Wizard had not written down; the joys and happiness of the creatures of the woodland realm, their sufferings and sadness, all were spelled out on the pages of the Book, as the Wizard wrote them. But the Wizard was getting old; there was still much to write and he feared that he would not live long enough to write it all. If the Book was left unfinished, then all the creatures in the woodland, both the greater and the lesser, would cease to be, and this made the Wizard sad.

So he thought and thought about how best to finish the tale of the tangled woodland, and, in the end, he wrote one last sentence in the Book. Under the cover of the darkest night, he took the Book to the middle of the nearest village of humans, and he left it there. And as long as the humans read it, all the creatures of the woodland remained alive; for the last line the Wizard wrote was this: In my End is my Beginning.


-- 30 --

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