“Arielle and the Library of Feeling”

Arielle sat at the edge of a glowing river, her feet dipped into water that hummed like a lullaby. The current didn’t push or pull — it simply existed, like a thought that never left your mind.

She was dressed in a flowing robe that shifted colors as her emotions changed. Right now, it pulsed a slow turquoise — the shade of curiosity and contentment. Beside her sat a hawk with velvet feathers and the eyes of an old friend.

“You’re ready for the library,” it said, without moving its beak. The words simply entered her thoughts, polite and warm.

She nodded.

Moments later, the meadow around her dissolved into paper. Thin sheets of sky folded in, and she was standing in a massive hall built from polished obsidian and sunlight. Infinite staircases curled into spirals, disappearing into higher and higher ceilings that glittered with soft bioluminescent stars.

This was The Library of Feeling — a temple where emotions were written into physical books.

Each book was bound in velvet or sand or bark or soft crystal. Each one held a single moment of feeling, from a single being, somewhere across the endless heavens. You didn’t read them with your eyes. You placed your hand on the cover, and it bloomed in your chest.

Arielle’s fingers brushed against one.

Regret.
It opened like a song in her belly. A father on Earth, sobbing in the rain, begging his daughter not to walk away. The daughter didn’t turn back, and yet, she loved him. Arielle cried gently — not out of sadness, but from how much love it took for that moment to exist.

She placed it back and smiled. “Thank you.”

She wandered deeper. Ecstasy.
A woman gave birth, singing through the process as lights danced across her spine. Her lover caught the child with hands glowing gold. Arielle gasped. She could feel the birth happening inside her as if it were her own. It wasn’t sexual — but it was deeply sacred. A passage of life so full, it nearly burst.

In the next room, souls floated like jellyfish, absorbed in books made of memory-mist.

One floated toward her. They looked ageless — half-bird, half-human, with a crown of seashells. “Do you want to feel someone you once hurt? Or someone who once hurt you?”

“I don’t need to,” she said.

“But you’re allowed,” they replied. “And it won’t hurt here. You’ll just understand them. And that’s the same as healing.”

So Arielle chose. She touched a book labeled with a name she hadn’t spoken in lifetimes. The one who once abandoned her.

And in that moment, she felt it all — his pain, his confusion, his love for her that hadn’t died. Just… disappeared under the weight of his own shame.

Arielle wept again. But it was joy now. She had never understood it so clearly.

Later, she left the Library and went to a café that floated above a field of singing grass. She drank passionfruit tea that sang in her chest like harp strings, and watched two lovers flirt by casting minor spells at each other, causing one another’s clothes to briefly change colors and textures. They laughed, kissed, then turned into birds and flew away.

The hawk from earlier reappeared beside her.

“Feel good?” it asked.

“I remembered who I am,” Arielle said. “And I think I’m ready to dream with someone now.”

The hawk nodded, satisfied. “Then tonight, you’ll meet them.”

And as night fell — stars rising in strange colors — the heavens whispered with the promise of a shared dream, just waiting to begin.