The city had once lived, blazing with light. The books all described this. The Ghoul-Poet sat in the midst of a heap of them, pages torn, rotting, spread out all about him. This was a library, the pride of New City, or rather a square that had faced the library, that had received this avalanche of thought—words embossed on parchment—that cascaded down when the library burst, its walls weakened by age. It was a treasure trove, this mountain of dreams and abstracts, histories and myths. Some true, some perhaps not.
The Poet’s head was filled, too, until he felt it might burst.
Yet he continued on, reading. Devouring. Another poetic thought, that one might eat words. The abstracts behind them.
The legends he picked out, the themes repeated in tale after tale, history after history. The power of love. The joinings together. And yet of death also—there was even, here, a legend about ghouls! And of a great storm, but how both human- and ghoul-kind survived it. And of the great world beyond even the river that separated New City from the Tombs, there where all New Cityers strove, in time, to go.
It was not so easy, this being a Poet.