Like a house after a fire
A shattered remnant still remains
In the absence of the pyre
No longer even knowing pain

Where once stood the ever proud
Now there is naught but ashe and dust
And now night, a fitting shroud
Descends upon the empty husk

The fire could not itself keep
In the wind, it blazed and it grew
When fuel was gone, it did sleep
How great a debt it did acrue

First

I don't remember my first book, I was young, and there wasn't exactly a great deal of depth to the stories provided to children of my young age. The point, after all, was the reading itself, just learning how to make sense from the scribbles on the paper. I do, however, remember with distinctness my first love.

I remember when I first laid eyes on it, nestled in a school library among books of entirely different natures.  To this day I'm not sure what it was doing there, far outside the reading level we were intended to spend our time within.  I can only assume there was some librarian who could not stand the thought of a collection without it, and I must confess that I agree.

The spine alone was distinctive.  Where the other books had titles written in block letters beneath the laminate, it proclaimed in a distinctly different script, above a gilded tree, that this book was not akin to the others.  Well, the length gave that away as well. But this was not a textbook, it had no quick moral, it was not something to be brushed aside with cheap laughs.  It was something new.  Something important.

I slid it from the shelf with reckless abandon.  The teacher with us, attempted to dissuade me, but it was too late, too late by far.  The golden star on the cover, the swirling reaches of the trees, the title had been written on the spine, but here the cover was content to let pictures play their part.  Looking back, they seem almost trite.  But it was there my judgment was made, and that judgment would not release me.

I stumbled through the pages.  The fears that it was beyond my ken were quite valid, but that only slowed me.  My parents I fear were likely driven half mad as I read, every word I did not know was dragged before them for analysis.  I was diving in waters I was not prepared for, barely able to swim, and I do fear that I drowned there, for I still have not got the taste out of my lungs.

And so it was that I made my first fateful encounter with fantasy, through the mind of J.R.R. Tolkien.  To these pages I would return, time and time again, as my vocabulary and understanding increased.  It became a familiar world, and yet it seemed that each time I dove into it there was something new, something unexpected, something I had missed.  There was magic in the fifth grade when I finally broke through all that sappy stuff with Aragorn and Arwen and found a chapter at the end with a resolution I had not expected (and which those who only saw the movies have also not yet known.)  It was an escape, it was release, it was a safe harbor.

Don't really have an ending so that's it! Stop reading go away uhhghhghghghgh.