I awoke before the sun.
The air was still — unnaturally so — as though the world had not yet decided whether to continue existing. My breath came out in faint clouds, pale and weightless, vanishing before they reached the air.
The little boy, Lioran, slept soundly beside Elyndra, his small chest rising and falling with the rhythm of dreams that didn't belong to him. The fire had gone out during the night, but its ashes glowed faintly, faint as dying ink.
I rose quietly. The floor creaked beneath my feet — but only once. The sound repeated oddly in my ears, like an echo searching for a body that had already disappeared.
When I stepped outside, the world was… different.
At first, it was subtle — the kind of difference you can only sense, not see. The trees stood taller than I remembered, their leaves bearing colors that had no name. The air smelled faintly of rain, though the ground was dry. Even the river beyond the huts — the same river where I'd once rested — flowed in the opposite direction.
I frowned. I knew this wasn't how it was.
But the villagers, who had begun to stir, walked past me with the same dull familiarity, greeting me as if nothing had changed.
As if it had always been this way.
"Morning, traveler," one of them said, a woman with kind eyes.
She had never spoken to me before — I was sure of it.
Yet she smiled as if she had known me for years.
Her name came to my tongue before I could stop myself.
"Good morning, Sera."
She paused — delighted. "Ah, you remember!"
I froze. Remember what?
She patted my shoulder warmly and walked on, humming an old tune I had never heard before. But as I listened, the melody echoed with strange familiarity — like something written for me to recall but never question.
The world had changed, and no one knew it.
Elyndra appeared soon after, her hair disheveled, her eyes bright with the freshness of morning. "You're up early," she said, smiling softly. "Did you sleep well?"
I wanted to tell her everything — about the reversed river, the altered forest, the woman whose name I somehow knew — but the words caught in my throat.
Because as I looked at Elyndra, I noticed something else.
Her necklace — a small silver pendant she had worn since I met her — was gone.
In its place hung a woven charm of crimson thread.
She followed my gaze. "Do you like it?" she asked. "You're the one who gave it to me, remember?"
My chest went cold. "I… gave that to you?"
"Of course." She laughed lightly. "You made it when we met. You said it would bring luck. Have you forgotten already?"
Forgotten.
The word struck something deep within me — a chord of unease, a vibration beneath the ribs.
This was no simple illusion. The story had changed again. The lines had been rewritten — characters adjusted, memories replaced.
But not for me.
I could still remember the version before — the version where the river flowed east, where Sera did not exist, where Elyndra's pendant was silver and cold.
Now, only I carried those memories.
And that meant only one thing —
The Author was editing.
By noon, the entire village pulsed with false familiarity.
Every corner had been rewritten to perfection.
The scars on walls had vanished, replaced by intricate carvings of symbols I didn't understand. Children played games I had never seen before, yet I could name their rules without trying.
Reality had been retouched, smoothed over like a sentence rewritten until it lost its original meaning.
And the people — the people were unaware.
They moved through this new script without resistance, like actors unaware their lines had changed overnight.
Elyndra spoke of things that had never happened — markets I'd never visited, journeys we'd never taken, laughter we'd never shared. And yet, her eyes shone with conviction. To her, they were memories as real as breath.
I began to feel dizzy. My head throbbed with overlapping truths. Two realities — the old and the new — pressed against each other inside my skull like mirrors trying to occupy the same space.
And from somewhere above — unseen but undeniable — I felt the gaze again.
The same one that had written the void into land.
The Author was watching.
That night, sleep would not come.
I lay beneath Elyndra's roof, staring at the faint cracks in the ceiling that weren't there yesterday. My heart beat too loudly, too human, too real for a world that was now only half-truth.
When the wind passed through the shutters, I heard it again — the scratching sound, faint and rhythmic. Not outside. Not in the room. But through it.
A pen, dragging itself across invisible parchment.
Writing.
Or worse — rewriting.
I rose and followed the sound, my feet carrying me through the hut's door into the night.
The village was silent. Every fire had gone out, every shadow fixed in place as though time itself had been paused for revision.
Then I saw it — faint, almost hidden — letters forming in the air above the river's surface.
Lines of glowing script, written by an unseen hand.
They wrote in silence, curling across the darkness:
"At dawn, the stranger will forget this fear.
He will remember only what the world remembers."
I took a step back, breath ragged.
The words shimmered — then bled into the water and vanished.
For a moment, I thought I had imagined it. But then, faintly, I heard Elyndra's voice behind me.
"Carten," she whispered. "Why are you awake?"
I turned. Her eyes were distant — not her own. For a second, her outline flickered, as if the ink of her existence had not yet dried.
And then she smiled. "You look frightened. Did you have a bad dream?"
"No," I said quietly. "I'm still inside one."
The next morning, I woke to the smell of bread — warm, unfamiliar. The village was buzzing with life again, unchanged, perfect.
And yet when I went to the river, it no longer flowed backward.
It flowed the right way.
Or perhaps… the new right way.
When I asked Elyndra about the carvings on the village walls, she laughed.
"There've always been carvings, silly. You noticed them yesterday."
But I hadn't.
Not in my yesterday.
I realized, with a growing chill, that I was no longer living a story being written.
I was living inside one being revised.
And the revisions never stopped.
That night, as I sat alone by the dying embers of the hearth, I whispered to the dark,
"Are you still watching?"
The silence replied with a faint scratch — the sound of a quill turning the page.
And somewhere far beyond sight, I knew the Author smiled.
Because the world had already begun to change again.