There was such a land where actions were reflections of words, and
the unfolding of one's life followed one's writing upon pages. In this
land there lived a girl who, through gift or bane, could write stories
that escaped the pale shadow of mortal beauty. And for this, her
adventures were fey. Three suitors called upon her for to court
her fair hand. With the last and the least of these she became
friends, where the first two became lovers for a time. But throughout
their friendship, the third man held such longing for her in her heart
as to hold all other eligible ladies in contempt. And were truth to be
known, the girl held feelings for him too. But in their love, they
were blind to that of the other.

One day, the girl met a boy who, out of the haughtiness of youth, had
refused to write a single page lest it be unto perfection. Curious,
the girl began to spend time with him. She taught him how to write,
and together they penned the story of how they fell in love. And the
girl, who had thought her heart could be tamed by no man, grew
attached.

For a time they were happy. But in the fire of his youth, the boy
thought that his own writings were unrivaled by those of his
lover. Out of goodness to her, he supposed, he offered to pen the
whole of their story together, leaving to her only the flighty details
proscribed to her sex. So love-sick was she that she truly believed in
the intentions of his heart, for in his hubris he believed them. So
she subsumed her story for his. He called for more of her paper that
he might embelish his fantasies in elaborate detail, soon leaving her
only a page per fortnight on which she might pen her dreams. Finally,
when she offered him her entire stack, he took it in anger and threw
it into the fire where it was consumed. "More!" he cried, "My words
shall rival the glimmer of the stars.  Get me more pages!"

Crying, and turned out, not knowing what to do, the girl found herself
wandered to the doorstep of her former suitor.  Seeing her, his heart
was moved, and they came to confess their love for one another, which
seemed very black against the sky drawn paling by the girl's
lover. "I need pages to write upon," she said amidst tears. The former
suitor had shrunk into a shadow of a man, and his paper, unreplenished,
had dwindled to a small stack.  Without a word save those untold by
sorrow-filled eyes, he took these up and handed them to her.  "You
have more, I take it?" she asked.  He only nodded, regretful not even at
knowing his last words had been penned but only at what might have
been between them.  She took the paper, and said thank you and goodbye.

What happened after this becomes confused and mired with different
accounts.  Some say the girl returned to her lover, and filled with
his delusions he wrote works of high acclaim but bereft of content,
while her suitor, no longer held by words, fell upwards through the
sky and passed out of recollection.  Others say that upon her return
home, the girl's lover spent her pages writing his own fortune.  The
girl, unblinded, took her own life, and at her funeral, her former
suitor asked her lover, "Do you know you took the last of my
pages?". The lover, shamed, changed his ways, and her suitor lived out
the remainder of his brief days in mourning behind a veil.  Still
others say that, spent with grief, the girl drew back to her former
suitor and they embraced, and on those few pages left they wrote words
of untold beauty which they shared with no one.  It is this last that
I choose to believe, for all else weighs too heavily on my heart.