Nel slipped into the empty spaces between words and vanished. The fall was jarring, yet not fully unexpected; for a while now, they'd felt the spindling creak of fracture beneath them as they'd tiptoed across the bold bars of text, as though the available stepping stones could not quite hold their weight. 

 

Better words, sturdier words were needed. Adamantine words that stood firm and strong beneath their feet. Or maybe words that bowed and sprung back with fantastic elasticity when stomped upon. Words that could support something as weighty as a person. But those weren't the words they had, so the fragile letters had shattered beneath them, leaving behind glittering shards that hung in place while Nel went down, falling into the white, blank nothing.

 

"I suppose this is the end of me," they thought to themself as they fell. Yet there was something oddly comforting about no longer having anything beneath their feet. Falling was... nicer than tiptoeing precariously about. If only it could last. But everything ends eventually, and Nel had a feeling that a fall of this height into something as dangerous as nothing would not be gentle.

 

It wasn't. But neither was it deadly. The blank space at the bottom of the fall crunched beneath them like wet snow, yet no cooler than fresh cotton sheets, shaping to their form with generous plasticity. 

 

In a need for sensation to prove their continued survival, Nel swooped their arms and legs up and down to make an angel of their landing-zone before rising to their feet. "Not my end afterall?" Nell said, bewildered and blinking.

 

The brightness of the space was blinding, but, with time, their squinting eyes confirmed what their body had felt: there was substance to this space between words that they never would have guessed at from the view above. Mounds of light piled around them, some like hills, some like mountains, and others like sublime sculptures, glittering subtly against the blank sky.

 

Nel turned around to look at their own impression left in the snow. Their angel imprint was far simpler than the swooping abstract sculptures around them, but they smiled at the shape of themself. What other forms could their hands learn to shape in these boundless fields of blank, malleable space?

 

A spectrum of color trembled on the concave angel's wings, catching Nel's attention. They looked up curiously, shielding their eyes against the full brightness of the light, peering through their fingers for the source of the colors. High above, the shattered word that had broken beneath Nel's weight still hung in place, its prismatic remains separating and casting the light that passed through it into a rainbow of ecstatic colors on the angel below.

 

Nel gave their surroundings another slow survey. Every sculpture danced subtly with a spectrum of light cast through the shards of countless broken words above. And, for the first time, Nel walked without fear of falling as they made their way through something as primordial as it was new.