It was the ninth hour, and the lamp in the copying room had burned down to a thread. The scribe had been told twice to put out the light, and twice she had not. On the desk lay the bestiary, open at the leaf where a dragon had been painted coiled about a capital, and she had been staring at it so long that the ink seemed to move. Then it did move. The tail slid out of the letter. The head lifted from the vellum, and the dragon looked at the words around it the way a cat looks at birds.
It did not eat them. It pushed through them, and the lines parted to let it pass, closing again behind its tail like water behind a boat. Where it breathed, the page browned and curled. The scribe watched a whole sentence blacken and fall away, and found that she was not afraid, only sorry for the sentence.
Scribes have always known that a margin is not empty. It is where a book keeps its animals. They are drawn small so that no one will notice them, and drawn in red so that they will be noticed anyway. Most of them stay where they were put. A few, on long nights, when the lamp is low and the reader has not gone to bed, decide that the page is a field, and the words are only grass.
Move your hand and it will follow. Press, and it will breathe.