Is the sheet ruined? Or a work of art?

The ink covers the page from edge to edge, dripping ink into the mechanism. Jewels form around the center, locking up the keys in crystalline splendor

Blindly, she hits a key, and watches it crick-a-crunch a glistening impression of a "K' into a puddle

Glisten. Lovely mouthfeel, that. If ever a word felt like what it is, glisten does--a pool of saliva, holding the light of the 's' in your mouth. Guh-llllissss-en.

She can't even tell where one sentence ends and the next begins. The page squirms with letters like bark on a tree. You know, bark, that thing that famously squirms.

The marionette's strings are cut. 

No, no, not cut. Wrong word. Discarded. Abandoned. Left to sag beneath her, pull her down, tug on her wrists and arms and chest like an event horizon. The music is dead, poisoned, probably on the end of a lovely stiletto.

"X" splatters its way through the mirror, and the page is left as smooth for its passage as a rough pond.

Ways of thinking. That's what--

The thought should electrify. Light her on fire, push her through life. 

It's the answer she's been seeking. Or, perhaps better said, [i]an[/i] answer. 

We get so set into ways of thinking that we cannot even see the bars of the cage. Not just in, in ritual, in ceremony, in the "correct" way to worship. In what we want, instead of what is, what could be. We build and rebuild, every day, the way of thinking that reinforces the way we think.

… It's not enough. Not enough to simply destroy the Azura Skies. To cast them down, and then do a nicer, politer version of it. It's the same thought patterns, the same cage, the same seats, over and over again.

But how to. How to avoid the cage?

She stares into the mirror at the figure behind her. At the purple eyes, so full of a smile. New thoughts. And carefully, she reaches up and places one hook in his fingers.