Consider a man by his pulpit. His life has been long and full of inner turmoil, and outer. It begins as he finds out that he will never die. Time does not exist for this man.
‘All who are like you and I end up desolate and sad,’ his maker says. ‘Eternity breeds boredom. We try to change, to alter ourselves, find new hobbies and interests, new friends and lovers, but the infinity of time and space is our cage and we cannot stay attached to anything for long, for there is so much else out there that we must explore simply because others can’t.’

But he decides to thwart fate, act in a manner calculated to counteract the prophecy. He decides to choose one profession and to spend eternity improving his skills in it. He contemplates various professions. As a physician he is able to cure any disease. As a magician he can fool any audience. As a mathematician he can calculate any odds. And as a philosopher he can probe any truth.

He spends so much time pondering the proper profession for an immortal, that he fears his pondering might be what he shall do forever. But in the end he chooses to become a writer, which he feels incorporates much of the abovementioned.

But there is a price. “Eternity breeds boredom.” And now he can wield his words like a sword of amber through the hearts and minds of mortals. He knows exactly what words to use, and how, and when, to produce the right effect, to inspire emotion, to build someone up, or to tear him down. He has written hundreds of books in hundreds of languages under hundreds of assumed names, his noms de plume - or noms de guerre, rather, in his war against boredom.

With each word of each paragraph of each page of each volume, his skill with words has improved. But now he cannot read anything anymore. He has long since ceased to read his own works even, knowing his abilities too well to doubt their impression on others and their failure to impress him.

Nearly a millennium passes since he first puts words down on parchment, mere scribble then, a lifetime separating it from what he writes today. But then he had the will. He still had hope. Now perfection has cost him both, and he must end it all.

He cannot die and he cannot change his profession as long as there are customers for his trade, and so the only exit left to him is to have there be no more readers, have there be no more words, to in a way force him to explore something else, of which he'll grow bored and that he'll expel a thousand years from now as well.

He spends years, decades even, formulating a single sentence, a single perfect phrase that will spread across the world like a plague infecting every reader, every listener, and incinerating every last fragment of their love of words.

He considers the risks, the measures that must be taken. He designs his words to be copied, and plants secrets in his handwriting, and in the spelling, grammar, ambiguity of his work to affect even illiterates, people with different dialects, of different age, gender and ethnicity. Not even the number of books the reader has consumed in his short time has any way of escaping this phrase.

He wants his last opus to be a return to his roots, so he uncorks his inkpot, dips a quill in the dark nectar inside, readies a piece of parchment only large enough to fit these words.

He'll just leave it somewhere, in a museum perhaps, in the middle of the town square, or on the dusty volumes of a library somewhere, for some unsuspecting scholar to stumble on and study.

He inspects the tiny scroll, scans it for imperfections, admires it, tests the consistency and shade of the ink, caresses the quill with his fingers, and recites the phrase aloud to himself one last time before committing it to the parchment.