I could not sleep.
The moonlight bled softly through the cracks in Elyndra's hut, pale and trembling like an unfinished brushstroke. The night air was heavy — not with silence, but with the faint hum of something vast and unseen, a rhythm I had begun to feel rather than hear. The rhythm of writing.
The world felt… suspended.
As if the pen had paused mid-motion.
Elyndra and the boy, Lioran, slept soundly beside the hearth, their breathing calm, steady, untroubled. They were creatures of this written peace — beings sustained by lines of ink I could not see but could almost sense flowing through them. The faint shimmer of divine authorship clung to their forms, soft as candlelight.
But me?
I was awake in a world that should have been asleep.
I sat up slowly, the straw mat creaking beneath me. My mind was a labyrinth of questions — coiling, growing, feeding on itself.
If this world was written, then someone must be writing it.
If that someone was the Author… then why did He not act?
Why let the Shadowwrath rise? Why let the fortress rot, the souls wail, the truths vanish beneath the ink of silence?
Couldn't He save this world Himself?
Or perhaps — and this thought chilled me more than the cold air ever could — perhaps the Author was never meant to save it.
Perhaps He was the one I was meant to fight.
I stared at the roof, at the faint scars where smoke had darkened the beams. My thoughts refused to still. Every time I tried to rest, I felt it — that distant gaze. The same one that had watched me when the divine hand wrote the world anew. The same gaze that lingered whenever I spoke words that didn't belong to this story.
The Author was watching me.
No, not just watching.
Waiting.
The fire had burned out hours ago, yet the air was still warm, as if the world itself held its breath. I lay back and closed my eyes, but sleep remained a stranger. Instead, I drifted between thoughts, between the seams of dream and waking.
And then — faintly — I heard it.
The sound of scratching.
Like a quill dragging across parchment, deliberate and distant. The rhythm was familiar — too familiar. I sat up, heart pounding, eyes scanning the dim hut. But there was nothing. Only shadows, only the soft rise and fall of Elyndra's breath.
Still, the sound persisted — from nowhere, from everywhere.
Scratch. Pause. Scratch.
Each stroke sent a ripple through the air, as if the world were reacting to every line being written somewhere beyond its skin.
I stepped outside.
The night greeted me with its cold breath. The village lay silent, wrapped in mist, the moon hanging like a tear suspended in ink. Every hut seemed to slumber, yet the ground beneath my feet felt alive — humming faintly, trembling as if something immense stirred below.
I looked toward the horizon.
The land that had been void — the world that had been rewritten — shimmered faintly, the ink of its creation not yet dry. There was beauty there, yes, but also instability. The grass bent in unnatural rhythm, the trees swayed though no wind touched them. The world pulsed, faintly echoing the rhythm of the quill I heard in my mind.
The Author is still writing.
And yet, the question clawed at me:
What is He writing now?
For a fleeting second, I saw something impossible.
A flicker of movement — a shadow passing through the fields, tall and angular. A shape not meant for this world.
I blinked — and it was gone.
But in its absence, I felt something else.
A pulse in the air.
A whisper in my skull.
A line being written into me.
Words formed in the back of my mind, unbidden, unwanted:
You are the unwritten thought made flesh.
The error that escaped the pen.
I staggered, breath catching. The world tilted.
The ink in the air seemed to thicken, the stars above smearing like wet paint.
My head throbbed with the echo of those words.
Unwritten thought.
Error.
Was that what I was?
A mistake?
I pressed a hand to my temple, forcing my breath steady. But the whisper returned — softer this time, nearer.
You were not chosen, Carten. You were found.
Found. By whom? For what?
The voice — no, the script — did not answer. It simply unraveled inside me, each word scratching across my mind like a quill through paper.
I turned back toward the hut, where Elyndra and the boy slept. Their forms glowed faintly with life, steady, secure. They were written, whole and complete. They belonged to this story. Their fates were bound to the ink that made the world.
But me — I had seen the void.
I had seen what comes before ink, before words, before life.
And now I feared it had seen me back.
I walked to the edge of the village again, drawn by something unseen. The ground trembled softly, almost imperceptibly. I knelt and pressed my hand to the soil. It felt wrong — too smooth, too deliberate. Like a freshly finished painting hiding the brushstrokes underneath.
"Why can't I rest?" I whispered. "Why can't I forget?"
No answer came. Only the distant echo of the quill.
Scratch. Scratch. Scratch.
Each stroke felt closer now, threading through my veins like ink through parchment.
I looked up. The stars flickered — not like celestial fires, but like words blinking in and out of existence. The night sky was rewriting itself.
And then — it appeared again.
The shadow of the divine hand, faint but unmistakable, stretching across the heavens. The quill gleamed, each motion slow and deliberate. But this time, it wasn't writing the world.
It was writing me.
My breath caught. I felt the pull in my chest, the strange ache of being filled and emptied at once.
Lines of light burned faintly on my skin, like invisible ink coming alive. Words in a language I couldn't read crawled across my arms, glowing briefly before fading again.
"Stop," I whispered. "Please… stop."
But the pen did not stop.
It wrote another line, and another — each one sinking deeper, shaping something within me I couldn't comprehend. My thoughts began to splinter. I felt memories shifting, rearranging — as if my past were being edited before my very eyes.
Elyndra's laughter.
The fortress of broken glass.
The god's eye in the sky.
The Shadowwrath's whisper.
All of it began to blur.
Then, as suddenly as it began, the quill stilled.
The divine hand froze.
And for a moment, I felt the world hold its breath again.
The ink upon my skin cooled. The tremors beneath my feet ceased. The silence returned, vast and suffocating.
When I looked down at my reflection in the stream beside the village, I saw words etched faintly along my collarbone — barely visible beneath the moonlight.
"He begins to awaken."
A chill shuddered through me. I wiped the words away, but they remained, shimmering faintly beneath the surface of my skin. The ink had sunk too deep.
Behind me, I heard a soft voice.
"Carten?"
Elyndra stood in the doorway, rubbing her eyes. The firelight behind her painted her form in gold. "Are you all right? You've been out here for so long."
I forced a weak smile. "I couldn't sleep."
She tilted her head, concern flickering in her gaze. "You look pale," she said. "Like you've seen a ghost."
I almost laughed. A ghost? No.
I had seen the one who wrote ghosts into being.
"It's nothing," I murmured. "Just… the wind."
She smiled faintly and turned back inside, her voice fading softly. "Then come back before it catches you."
The door closed. The world was quiet again.
I looked once more at the horizon — the land that had been void now lush and living — and whispered to the night:
"If the Author writes the world…
then who writes the Author?"
The question hung in the air like smoke.
Unanswered. Unanswerable.
Somewhere far beyond the stars, I could feel that unseen gaze tremble — amused, perhaps. Or curious.
And then, faintly, beneath the heartbeat of the night, I heard it again.
A new sound.
The turn of a page.