This Is How You Lose the Time War

by Amal El-Mohtar

It’s so easy to crush a planet that you may overlook the value of a whisper to a snowbank.

(Adventure works in any strand—it calls to those who care more for living than for their lives.)

Words can wound—but they’re bridges, too. (Like the bridges that are all that Genghis left behind.) Though maybe a bridge can also be a wound? To paraphrase a prophet: Letters are structures, not events. Yours give me a place to live inside.

I love you. I love you. I love you. I’ll write it in waves. In skies. In my heart. You’ll never see, but you will know. I’ll be all the poets, I’ll kill them all and take each one’s place in turn, and every time love’s written in all the strands it will be to you.

Books are letters in bottles, cast into the waves of time, from one person trying to save the world to another.