IFFY FICTION

There was a knock at the study door. Fate grunted his permission to enter. The door creaked open, sending up a plume of dust from the floor.

Fate coughed, dipped his quill, and continued scrawling in his colossal tome. He felt something hovering over him. A presence. He turned to see who it was.

“Whatcha up to?” Perion’s eyes sailed across the page, line by line. He snickered, tapping a line about someone named Phil getting hemorrhoids. “That’s funny.”

Fate moved his arms to shield the words, careful not to smudge the lettering. “No one’s supposed to read this.”

“Sorry.” Perion moved around and perched on the edge of Fate’s desk. “You’ve been working on that a long time, huh?”

“Uh, yeah,” Fate said impatiently. He was eager to get back to writing. “I guess you could say that.”

“Seems boring,” Perion said, picking up Fate’s inkwell, and studying the label.

Fate glared at Perion, appalled at the golden boy’s audacity. “Well, if you consider authoring the destiny of every human life, from birth to death, boring…”

Perion chuckled, his blond locks flowing as he shook his head.

“Oh, that’s funny to you?” Fate snatched the inkwell from Perion’s hand. “Why don’t you get out of my study and go back to watching or observing, or whatever you do. Talk about boring…”

“That ink you’ve been using,” Perion said, touching the lip of the bottle, “you know it’s disappearing ink, right?”

“I know… wait what?” Fate grabbed the bottle and held it close to his bespectacled face. 

“You might want to check your book there.”

Fate began to flip through the pages of the cleverly named “Book of Fate.” The most recent were just as he had left them, but as he went back farther in time, they began to fade, until each leaf was nothing but bare vellum.

“No, no, no,” Fate pleaded, leaning his face closer in, hoping to see some trace of his labors. An eternity of words meant to last an eternity forward from their creation. Gone. Disappeared. Not a trace. Not even the indentation of a nib pressed too hard into the page. “This can’t be.”

Perion began to bellow with laughter, rattling the desk. He stood and walked to the door, shaking and wheezing. Stopping at the doorway, he looked back at Fate, who was frantically searching for an ink mark or an etching. 

“Well, my friend,” he said, still laughing, “it seems not everyone can live forever.”