The man with sharp eyes arrived on this Earth precisely at the right time, with the right intent and at the right location with a Click click, click click.

This was not the first time he had made this trip, but it just might be the last.  He had seen too much of what his former self was capable of; too much, that he could not bear to see any more in this world, not that there was anything worth gazing upon in the 24th century; it was all ashes of humanity.  He, had to be stopped.  This time, he knew where to step, where not to step, what to say, when to act, how to proceed.  Everything was mapped out.  It had been no use convincing, groveling, threatening or even showing the wordsmith the future, as his mind was too grounded on absolute, solipsist control.
Click click click.

Walking down the grimy streets, the man with sharp eyes surveyed decrepit building after decrepit building.  Proletarians sat on the corners of the street, warily and grudgingly watching the fine gentleman clicking along.  A few followed him until he reached his destination, a grand and opulent building.  It was the last and only tenement of words left on this bare Earth.  The proletarians were not allowed within 100 feet of the building, yet their thirst for eruditeness was unmatched by any desire.

Sensing the desolation of the people and edifices around him, the man with sharp eyes felt saddened, angered even, at the treatment and injustice he unknowingly caused them.   He wanted to fling off his commanding overcoat, undrape this false skin and blend back into the murk where he belonged.  Yet he knew that he couldn’t. It must be him that drags the millions out of the uncultured cesspool.

He entered the building quickly, this being the 42nd time he had traveled back in time, he was quite familiar with the layout of the building.  Besides, he needed to act expediently to change the lives of the millions now, the millions yet to come, and the millions who emerge from ashes like phoenixes.  He shuffled down, letting his fingertips drag on the stained Oakwood bookshelves.

“Can I help you sir?” A familiar voice echoed down the rows of bookcases. There, sitting atop a marble throne, was the wordsmith.  This jovial, spectacled man held the key to all the literature in the world, all condensed and compiled in his private kingdom.  He had the power to take seemingly finite letters and arrange them sharply on solid medium, able to construct whole worlds out of thin air then destroying them, and defining the abstractedness of the entropic universe.  Yet the man with sharp eyes was not fooled by his appearance.  His demeanor was much more sinister…

“If you’re looking for a book, any book, I would have the one for you.” The wordsmith hesitantly approached the man with sharp eyes, dancing around him carefully as he walked forward as if he were a glass sculpture.  “Assuming, of course, that you could pay for it…” He added dryly.

The wordsmith squinted behind the thin frames of his thick glasses.  His brilliant, azure eyes stared intensely at the being in front of him, sizing him up.  The man seemed to be clad smartly from head to toe, even carrying an ornate cane; he could not have been a proletarian type, the wordsmith thought confidently.

The man nodded his head slowly, methodically, then subtly added, “Thank you, but I think I’ll look around your collection for a while.”

“Alright, if you need me then just give a holler, mister.”  The wordsmith spun around and resumed his position on the marble throne and buried himself in The Inferno by john a. doe. 

The man finally stopped, starting at the section creative fiction, then, the sub-category alternative languages.  Lips pursed, he gingerly picked up the first book in the row; Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by John a. Doe.  Next book: the Decameron, by John a. Doe; Flowers for Algernon, John a. Doe; The Great Gatsby, John a. Doe.  Every book he flipped through he grew increasingly frustrated, the books adding fuel to his furnace of feverous rage.  Oliver Twist, by John a. Doe.

He raised his hand and waved his host over.

“You write these books?” He asked gruffly. “Don’t you share them?”

The wordsmith hurried over, a stack of books teetering precariously under his hands.

“Wrong.  I wrote all the books. Every.  Book.” his mouth said, and eyes leered.  “These … proletariats, they don’t need creativity getting in their heads.  Best left to people like you and I, eh?  One to rule them all.”

“Humans are inquisitive creatures, they want what they can’t have.  You have it all, though, maybe one day they’ll break down your walls and get to your books.  With the books and the knowledge, their just like you and I.”

“Don’t compare us to them, they’re innately different.”

“How so?”

“They just are,” he snapped.

“Then how about the bible?  There’s no way you could have written that.”

The wordsmith gave the man an irritated look. “What use is there in believing in a God?  It was merely humanity’s first attempt at creative writing.”

“Yet you live in a private enclave, telling these people rules they must live by without explanation, pretending that you are just.  There is no God, YOU are not God.”

The wordsmith remained silent, unmoved, like the other 40 times the sharp eyed man had tried to trump his opponent.  A discover check was set, yet the black king stared blankly into the haughty face of the white queen.

“Sir, are you pleading with me?” He smirked.  “Why would anyone want to give up their power?”

The man with sharp eyes clenched his fists until his knuckles turned white with rage, but took a deep breath, controlling his raggedy breath.  He had to know why first.  Why I am going to release us, he thought.  Slowly, he pulled a grimy paperback copy of Slaughterhouse Five (by John a. Doe) from his overcoat pocket.

“Ah, yes.  A fine work of art by none other than myself,” he smiled.  Seeing his own work, he began quoting the book, so caught up that he didn’t ask how the fine gentleman had acquired it: “here we are, stuck in the amber of the moment.  There is no why.”

The man with sharp eyes cleared his throat.  “Yet if you truly are agnostic, you would just leave the past be.  No one can control knowledge, not even god could keep Adam and Eve from eating the forbidden fruit.”

He walked up to the wordsmith, clenched his face with one massive hand and threw him outside his opulent palace of words, and then plunged a dagger straight into his heart.

The wordsmith fell, clutching his books till the last second.  Crimson petals fluttered onto the cream colored parchment.  Only when he finally toppled to the ground did he release the books; the effervescent words jumbling and excited, bound in by leather bindings for too long.  They echoed to the summit.  At last, the words were free.  A stunned, dirty crowd looked on, then immediately stepped over the sprawled body of the verbose brute and scrambled into his bastion to absorb the erudite elixir.

The man with sharp eyes takes off his dark, elliptical glasses and procures a fine, silk handkerchief from his coat, wiping the blood from his lens, the sweat from his brow, revealing eyes slit by sharp razors.  The irises, once brilliantly azure, were now faded blue and marred by cataracts, but nevertheless had a presence inside the penumbra, a soul within the stygian pits of his pupils.  He takes out the dirty copy of Slaughterhouse Five, tracing the cover page with a subtle finger, feeling the dots on the pages: Slaughterhouse Five, by … Kurt Vonnegut.

Finally, his work done, he fades into the shadows, the myriad of atoms composing his corporeal being fading between the lines of ink and cream.