The Ink Drinker

I was not born hungry.

I was made that way.

In the beginning, I only read to pass the silence. I curled beside windows with books too large for my hands and let the wind turn the pages. Words were soft then. Gentle. Like lullabies trapped in ink. I read about queens who ruled without raising their voices. About beasts who bowed only to kindness. About spells that healed rather than harmed. I read until the world outside dulled and the world within sharpened.

And then I began to consume.

I tore through libraries like storms tear through cities. Dictionaries, grimoires, romance novels, field guides. I underlined sentences that sang. I memorized paragraphs that bled truth. Every word I swallowed filled me with something new. Not just knowledge — something older. Wilder.

I started dreaming in other languages. Waking with syllables etched on my arms like birthmarks. I stopped reading for plot and started reading for power. I wanted the marrow of meaning. The bones beneath the poetry.

People noticed. They called me gifted. Precocious. A prodigy. What they didn’t see was how the words clung to me long after the page closed. How they nested in my chest, whispering things no child should understand. I couldn’t stop. Not even when the books began reading me back.

You think that’s impossible? You’ve never truly listened to a sentence.

The ink has a voice, if you’re quiet enough. A hum just under your heartbeat. A kind of knowing that coils in your blood. I learned to hear it. I leaned in. And the words, oh—how they opened to me. I tasted metaphors like honey. I unraveled metaphysics like thread. I didn’t just read magic. I became it.

They don’t tell you that stories are spells.

They don’t tell you that reading can become ritual.

That if you read with enough need, with enough hunger, the books begin to change you.

One day, I looked in the mirror and didn’t recognize the girl I’d been. My eyes held libraries. My hands inked truths. My voice—when I used it—carried the weight of legends. I no longer walked. I wandered. Drifted through bookstores and back alleys, collecting forgotten volumes, whispering to old pages.

People stopped meeting my gaze. They sensed something they couldn’t name. I didn’t mind. I wasn’t lonely. I had stories.

And then, one night, I met a man who claimed to write reality.

He said, “If you could write one sentence into the world and make it true, what would it be?”

I smiled.

Then I drank his words.

Literally.

He screamed, of course. They always do the first time. But I didn’t hurt him—not really. I only took what he offered. The sentence that mattered most to him. And I made it mine.

That’s when I knew: I was no longer a reader.

I was a rewriter.

A re-weaver.

A wordwitch.

I collect stories now, not just in books, but in people. I walk through cities listening for unsaid desires. I taste secrets in unfinished poems. I press my fingers to unwritten pages and pull stories from the silence.

You might meet me one day.

Maybe in a quiet café, when the rain makes the air soft and strange. Maybe in a bookstore aisle you’ve never noticed before. You’ll see a woman with eyes like torn paper and a voice like forgotten verses.

And she’ll ask you one question:

“What truth are you willing to trade for a story?”

Say yes.

Say it softly.

Say it like you mean it.

And I will show you how to drink ink.