Paragraph: (Fiction-stories-masc-The_Black_Willow-4.txt)
Sent 1: Allan crouched over his desk once more, pen in hand and mind blank.
Sent 2: He contemplated a story, an outline he had laboriously constructed some time ago.
Sent 3: He had filled his pen and raised it, the nib descending towards the paper, before the sound came: the gentle, persistent tapping of the gnarled, primeval willow touching the window with long, insistent fingers.
Sent 4: His eyes awoke with a passionate, determined flame, though the only light came from the glutted moon.
Sent 5: Allan filled page after page, the words escaping from his mind onto the paper.
Sent 6: Where before they had marched in regiments, practiced in ranks and followed their leaders' commands, the words now escaped in their true forms, unhindered by any stricture.
Sent 7: He continued long into the night, until the eldritch orb had sunk into the waiting hands of the willow, raised perpetually skyward.
Sent 8: Arthur looked up from the results of a night's frenzied labors and looked Allan in the eye.
Sent 9: "What is this?"
Sent 10: he queried, indicating the pages he held in his left hand.
Sent 11: "I decided that… since I wasn't having much success with more – traditional – stories, I might see what sort of work I produced if I let my imagination go freely," Allan replied, somewhat less self-assured than he had been the previous night.
Sent 12: "What in G-d's name could have possessed you to do such a thing," cried Arthur, nearly raising his voice.
Sent 13: "After all I said the day before, why have you abandoned centuries of literary progress for some self-indulgent fantasy?"
Sent 14: He shook the papers at Allan, raising them like a belt above the head of a disobedient son.
Sent 15: "This is nothing but a glorified Grimm's tale, a miscarried child of Stoker, a creation less fit to be published than to be told around an open fire at the hovel of some peasant!"
Sent 16: He spoke the last word with such heavy intonation that Allan shrank back before the physical wave of sound emanating from Arthur's throat.
Sent 17: "Do you hate the modern system of literature?
Sent 18: Do you personally despise the works the Enlightenment or the progress made since Shakespeare?"
Sent 19: For a moment, Allan could hardly do more than shake his head.
Sent 20: "No, of course not… I– " "Then why," Arthur barreled on, "do you disregard them all and return to this superstitious babble, this morbid, paganistic drivel?