The Flame that Unites 🔥

The Bank of Words is a sanctuary. It exists in lined Vaults of learned lexicons...in metaphors, asleep in golden safes, and idioms sipping tea in the atrium. Every utterance is its ledger...Every expression, its trusted watermark.

Lately...the system had begun to fray.

Writers barged in daily, demanding adjective'd overdrafts, forging similes, and smuggling verbs across sentence borders. Stoic clerks wearing seamed, pressed suits - were exhausted. Commas collapsed and Semicolons wept silently in the break room.

Then came the sleep-deprived customers...demanding entire poems, stories and an extended credit line on fill-in tales for writer's block.

A literary fire was lit, tempers flared, revolution flamed, crackling from the ceilings...meandering through the entire structure of the building.

“This is the last straw breaking the camel's back,” hissed the Head Archivist, a stern monocled ampersand.

“What does that even mean?” asked the customer, tendering a withdrawal in all capitals for...'Epiphany,’ ‘Solace,’ and ‘Flame'.

“It means,” the Archivist replied, voice trembling, “that we are burdened beyond limit. With incessant borrowing...credit withdrawals, and blatant pilfering of words without correct procedure or express permission.”

Lights flickered. Within the vault, metaphors combusted.

The room dimmed to Silence...The Flame-keeper entered.

Commanding - made of flickering vowels and mature ink...robe aglow with proverbial riddles. She carried the Last Flame - a tiny, trembling ember, the final reserve of linguistic fire.

🔥

“This flame...is all that remains. If it dies, we lose metaphor and mysticism...and the ability to say what cannot be uttered aloud.”

Writers scoffed. “It’s just a word.”

“No,” whispered the Flamekeeper...“It’s the word. It holds all.”

Without warning - the Flame flickered. 🔥

The walls begun dissolving into ellipses. Verbs fled. Nouns turned feral. The ceiling yawned, revealing a sky of unfinished sentences, unfinished stories - poems left half finished...all jostling to be next in line for the coveted awards stored in the vaults.

The disgruntled customer reached out. “Wait. I didn’t mean...”

Too late. The Flame leapt from the Flamekeeper’s hand...embedding a trembling phrase:

“Do not rebel...Unite.”

The Words erupted - not in fire...In poetry. A revolution of syntax and meaning. The Last Flame had not died...it had ignited.

Into an Invocation

Let flame burn in the hearts of all who write -

those who borrow not to steal...but to dream.

Let it flicker in ink-stained palms of poets,

igniting the riddles of mystery-makers.

Let it dance through margins of stories yet untold,

let it leap from vault to verse,

from ledger to lyric,

from silence to symphony.

Let every borrowed word be a promise kept.

Let every withdrawal be a seed of meaning.

Let every teller become a bard,

and every receipt a stanza.

Let success bring order to the chaos -

Let silence be made harmonic through song.

Relax the rules, sing through rhythm.

And when the stories have been sung,

when the metaphors have found their homes,

let the flame return to its resting place -

never extinguished...

Always cradled in the quiet of a well-told tale.