but everything looks perfect from far away
Time seems irrelevant when his whole life is marked only by pages, structures, and stone. In the Monastery, the monks did not tell him when it was morning or night, nor when to rise, nor when to rest. They only brought him to lesson after lesson in a house that was not a home. How could a temple, a holy place Ceylon's father would likely have destroyed if he'd had the chance, ever be more than a cage to hold the heart of a bird that longs for something more than what it's given without ever knowing exactly what? It can't. Simple. Like him. Ceylon is a simple thing that lives between the lines of text historians write down to catalog the events of the world. The rise and fall of kingdoms, places, people. All of it. Everything. It's the same.
One face blurs into another, they don't look at him, not really.
Ceylon wouldn't ask them to look at him. His blue eyes do not yearn to reach out and touch their skin, find solace on the image of their lips forming his name, learning the curve of their lashes until they are the inspirations to the rise of his next great masterpiece and resurrection of the past. He's tired of making people into places, of watching their lips curl up, down, and being unable to decipher exactly why. Of course, it really isn't as though he's tried hard, or at all, to learn what emotions look like on another's face. Only his sister's face showed him what the world could be like if he dared to step into it. She taught him to laugh, to sing.
When she left him, too, he forgot those things.
The monks made sure that he knew only papers, pencils, and particles until he dreamed them into existence, brought back the world that the demon of the sand so desperately tried to destroy. Why? He'd ask over and over at first. Why? he'd question the silence surrounding him. Eventually, Ceylon stopped asking people.
Eventually, Ceylon started asking papers.
In the monastery, there were plenty of books to occupy his hungry mind. Always, always is he thirsty for something new, an appetite for knowledge growing and growing with the passing of every moon cycle.
Someday, it might kill him.
Until then, he'll eat another book for breakfast and start another with his morning tea. It doesn't matter when the end comes, when time forgets that it has meaning, it only matters that he's here. Spines of trees have morphed into spines of books, titles carved into their stout trunks until they scream.
It is not a peaceful place, but instead, this library is a place of memory. So many memories that are dark and hidden. He'll learn them all. Someday soon, he'll know everything this wooded refuge has to offer.
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