The Girl walks toward the flicker and it does not flee. It steadies as she nears — a letter, she thinks at first, tall and wavering like a candle flame that has forgotten heat. But up close it is something stranger: a single word, or the ghost of one, hanging in the pale like a name spoken before there were ears to hear it. The letters are not quite any alphabet she knows, yet she understands each one the way you understand the meaning of a sound before you learn the sound has a name. She lifts her leather book. Her fingers hover, uncertain — this word is too old to touch carelessly. Then the void around it trembles, and from within the flickering shape something moves: a shadow, or a hand, reaching toward her from the other side of the word.