Role

Chapter 1

Once upon a time, there was a young girl who woke up without an ending. She
had no beginning, no parents, no family, no home, just an assigned name and a
nook in an orphanage that barely fit even her slight form. Over time, she
decided to find others' endings and beginnings by closely watching the daily
habits of her fellow orphans, the tenders, and those who walked by the window
every day.

At first entranced by the strangers and new outlooks and fresh thoughts that
each one held within themself, she soon grew to realize that every ending was
plainly visible after just a few moments of reading each story's page. The man
with the cart and the thin horse would always walk with his cart and his horse
to where he went during the day and then back again the way he came at night.
Poor children grew into poor adults and angry, violent people were angry and
violent until The End. Each character's own story was written by the
circumstances of their beginning and ended in a depressingly predictable
manner.

But what about those who didn't get beginnings? How could she know how her
story would end if she didn't know how it began?

She started to devour books and eavesdrop on people in the town, desperately
seeking within passages and phrases every imaginable beginning both mundane
and fantastic. But both it and The End still eluded her. The tragedies and
comedies in this town were simply too repetitive to help her.

When the time came, she slipped away from the orphanage to seek more stories,
more beginnings, and, most importantly, The End. The more evidence and
experiments she could conduct, the closer she could get to finding her own
story.

In a dream, she saw the circumstances of an ending that could be hers: A
world, suffused in light. Light so bright that it cast away all other colors.
In this world, there were no violent endings or parents who died or children
who had to seek themselves in the stories of others or unanswered questions.
It would be a world of pure radiance, a Happily Ever After, where she and
others could be happy just by being there. No more of the story would need to
be written.

This place, where there were no doubts and no pain, was surely the one that
she was born from. This must have been her beginning. She would go there
herself again one day, at The End, after burning out whatever tried to stop
her.