The ink on Aarav's desk had dried hours ago, yet the quill in his hand trembled—anxious, as if it still had something left to say.
He sat in the dim light of a flickering lamp, shadows clawing their way up the walls like restless spirits. Every heartbeat echoed too loud in the silence, every breath carrying a faint scent of iron and smoke.
He wanted to stop writing.
He needed to stop.
But the pages before him weren't blank anymore. They moved.
Sentences he didn't remember writing crawled across the paper in deep red ink:
> "The author never leaves his story. He only disappears between the words.
Aarav pushed back his chair, his pulse stuttering. "No… this isn't mine," he whispered. The lines looked alive—wet, breathing, pulsing like veins beneath the page.
Then came the whisper.
Not from the room.
From inside the walls.
> "Keep writing, Aarav…"
He froze. The voice—soft, lilting—belonged to Aisha. But she wasn't here. Not physically. She'd vanished three nights ago after that night in the old corridor—the night when the door had breathed.
He turned toward the corner of the room, where the shadows gathered thick as ink.
There she was.
Her outline shimmered like candle smoke, eyes reflecting the dull light. Her lips didn't move, yet her voice slithered into his mind.
> "The story isn't done until you bleed for it."
The quill in his hand quivered again. Aarav felt something sticky on his palm—blood. His blood. The nib had sliced open his skin, and yet, the quill drank greedily from the wound, its red tip glowing faintly as if satisfied.
He stumbled backward, clutching his hand.
But when he looked again—Aisha was gone.
Only her laughter remained, soft and dissonant, fading into the walls.
He wanted to leave. Every instinct screamed run. But the air thickened around him, pressing down like a living weight. The window refused to open. The door twisted in its frame, pulsing slightly, like a heart trying to beat.
That's when he noticed it again—the old diary. The one Aisha had once held with trembling hands. It lay open on his desk, and its pages fluttered on their own, whispering in some ancient rhythm.
Drawn to it against his will, Aarav read the first words that appeared:
> "Ink remembers. Flesh forgets."
The lamp flickered.
The shadows lengthened.
And from the diary, a crimson drop fell—landing on the floor, blooming like a tiny rose made of blood.
Aarav backed away, gasping, when the sound of scratching filled the room. It wasn't his pen this time.
It came from beneath the floorboards.
Slow. Rhythmic. Writing.
He knelt, trembling, and pried up one of the boards.
Underneath lay another page—ripped, wet, and inked with words he couldn't recognize. His name appeared again and again between the lines.
> "Aarav wrote me into being.
Now I will write him out."
The world tilted. The room groaned, the walls flexing as if inhaling. He tried to stand, but the shadows grabbed at his ankles like cold hands. His breath came out in fog, though the room wasn't cold.
Suddenly, a voice—not Aisha's this time, but his own—whispered behind him:
> "You knew what the Abyss was, didn't you?"
Aarav spun around. There he stood—another him—face pale, eyes black pools of ink. The doppelgänger smiled faintly, a smear of blood on his chin.
> "Stop fighting the story," the other Aarav murmured.
"You're the ink, not the writer."
The lamp shattered. Darkness swallowed the room whol.
When Aarav awoke, he was sitting again at the desk. His hand still held the quill. But the wound was gone. No blood. No pain.
Only the page in front of him, now filled with a fresh paragraph—written in perfect handwriting.
His own.
> "Aisha watches me from the mirror. She says I'm almost done.
But if I stop writing, I'll forget I ever existed."
He blinked. Looked up.
The mirror on the opposite wall rippled.
And from within, Aisha smiled.
Her reflection leaned closer, lips brushing the glass from the inside.
> "Welcome back to the story, Aarav."
The mirror cracked.
A hand reached out—her hand, pale and trembling, pulling him toward the glass.
He tried to resist, but the quill slipped from his grasp, spinning once in the air before landing on the page.
It began to write by itself.
> "The author entered his words.
And the house sighed in relief."