I'd spent eighteen fucking years preparing for greatness.
Eighteen goddamn years of cracked knuckles, split lips from biting down during silent incantations, and drilling somatic sequences so precise they could crack a fortress's spine with a flick of the wrist.
While my classmates were still jerking their hands like amateurs trying to make party lights flicker, I didn't sleep—I worked. My hands didn't shake from exhaustion; they trembled, alive with the raw, leftover voltage of magic I'd spent half my life learning to cage. To control. To wield like a goddamn scalpel.
While the rest of them whined about their bullshit "ethical boundaries" and "balance," I was already three steps ahead, calculating the exact moment a training dummy's core would shatter under sustained assault.
Magic wasn't some gentle art or mystical dance.
It was dominance. It was precision.
It was being the one motherfucker in the room who didn't flinch when the air started to scream.
Because I knew—deep in my bones, in the pulse of my blood, in the quiet, unshakable certainty that had carried me through every bruise, every failure, every time some smug instructor said, "Holly, you're too much"—that when I turned eighteen and got my lifebook, those pages wouldn't just be filled with some bullshit role like "Archival Assistant" or "Minor Ward Technician."
They'd fucking ignite.
They'd burn with purpose. With power. With a destiny so undeniable it would shut every doubter the hell up.
This was my proof. My vindication.
The moment the world would finally see what I'd always known:
I wasn't just strong. I wasn't just skilled.
I was meant for something monstrous.
Something legendary.
***
The morning of my birthday, I stood in front of the bathroom mirror, yanking at the collar of my shirt like it was trying to choke me.
I'd reluctantly agreed to wear something "presentable" for the ceremony—black pants, a fitted grey button-down, my best combat boots polished until they gleamed like blades—but I'd drawn the line at a fucking dress. Mom had tried, with that soft, hopeful look, like this was some sweet rite of passage.
Fuck that. I wasn't playing nice. I'd won that damn fight.
My ash-blonde hair fell in its usual choppy waves, just past my chin, uneven from where I'd hacked it myself last week. I tucked one side behind my ear with an irritated huff, fingers brushing the small, pale scar that notched my chin—a souvenir from a kinetic spell that got away from me at twelve.
My brown eyes locked onto my reflection—sharp, focused, ravenous.
Today was the goddamn day.
All the sacrifices, the loneliness, the endless repetition—it would all be worth it. Because today, my lifebook would open, and my future would be written in ink that didn't fade, didn't waver, didn't lie.
And on my forearm, the incomplete tattoo—the one every kid got at birth, a living script that recorded the first eighteen years—pulsed, warm beneath my skin. I traced a finger over the elegant runic script, feeling the subtle hum of magic embedded in my flesh.
A quiet promise.
By tonight, it would be complete. By tonight, the final glyphs would form, and I would finally know—exactly—what I was destined to become.
And everyone—my instructors, my peers, the elders—everyone knew.
Holly Quillen wasn't just going to be great.
She was going to be a fucking legend.
—
The ceremony room in the Librarian's temple stretched out before me like something ripped from a goddamn fever dream.
White marble floors so polished they reflected the impossible light like liquid silver. Light that didn't come from anywhere but just was, hanging in the air. The ceiling vanished into shadows so deep they might as well have been the edge of reality.
At the center of it all stood the Librarian.
This thing wasn't human.
Not even fucking close.
It stood too tall—seven feet? Ten? Who the hell could tell when its edges rippled, like heat off asphalt. Its robes weren't fabric—they were pages, thousands of them, stitched together into flowing layers that rustled without a breath of wind, whispering. And its face kept shifting, like a screen flickering between faces: sharp cheekbones one second, soft and round the next, never settling.
And the eyes.
Oh, holy shit, the fucking eyes.
They opened and closed across its face, its neck, even its hands—dozens of them, blinking in staggered rhythms.
All of them watching.
But I didn't flinch.
I wasn't about to let some cosmic fucking librarian make me feel small.
Around the room, other eighteen-year-olds waited with their families. A girl near the front bounced on her toes, grinning. A boy to my right looked like he was one breath from puking on his shiny shoes.
I just looked ready. I looked like hell yeah.
My parents stood behind me. Mom's hand rested warm on my shoulder, a tremor in her fingers. Dad stood solid, arms crossed. When I glanced back, he gave me that small, firm nod—the one he always did before a fight.
I believe in you.
"Mira Castellanos," the Librarian intoned, its voice a layered echo, like the walls themselves were speaking.
A girl stepped forward. The Librarian's too-long fingers—too many damn joints—plucked a book from thin air. She took it, opened it—
Her face lit up. Tears spilled. The book dissolved into a cascade of golden light, swirling around her before sinking into her skin, her tattoo flaring to life in elegant, flowing script.
One down.
Dozens more to go.
I waited, jaw clenched so tight my teeth ached, while name after name was called. Watched lives unfold. Some cried with happiness. Some looked stunned. One boy's face went bone-white as leaden grey script crawled across his arm—Archive Tender, Level Three. His mother caught him as he stumbled, her face tight with quiet horror.
And then—
The air shifted.
The whispers died.
The light dimmed, like the whole damn world was holding its breath.
The Librarian turned its shifting face toward me.
"Holly Quillen."
My boots clicked against the marble—sharp, steady—as I stepped forward.
Let them fucking stare. Let them remember.
The Librarian extended a hand, and a book appeared.
Leather-bound. Pristine. My name in gold across the cover, shimmering like they were alive, like they knew me.
Holly Quillen.
My lifebook.
My breath caught, just once, but my hands didn't shake as I reached for it. The second my fingers brushed the cover, warmth surged through my palm—deep, resonant, like a key sliding into a lock that had been waiting.
Not magic. Recognition.
I took it.
It was heavier than it should've been. Not with paper. With weight. Like it carried every broken nail, every sleepless night I'd poured into this moment.
The Librarian stepped back. Silent. Watching. All those eyes fixed on me.
I opened it.
First page: my birth. Runic script glowed, translating in my mind: Born winter solstice. First cry at dawn. Mother's joy. Father's pride.
I flipped.
Five years old—first spark of magic, a tiny blue flame on my fingertip.
Ten—accepted into advanced training, youngest in a decade.
Twelve—first combat win. I'd broken a boy's wrist. Didn't apologize. Still don't.
Fifteen—mastered a seventh-tier kinetic spell. Instructors called it "impossible."
I called it fucking Tuesday.
Page after page, my life unspooled in perfect, beautiful detail. Every bruise. Every victory. Every time I'd been told I was too much—and proved their asses right.
My throat tightened. This was it. This was proof.
And then—
I turned to the page marking my eighteenth birthday.
Nothing.
Just… blank.
White fucking space.
I blinked. Stared.
Turned the page.
Blank.
Another.
Blank.
My hands started to shake.
I flipped faster—harder—pages flying under my fingers like I could outrun the emptiness—
But it was all nothing.
Every single fucking page after today—blank.
No title. No path. No purpose.
Just white.
And the worst part?
The book didn't feel surprised.
It just sat there, warm and heavy and complete—like this was exactly how it was supposed to be.
Like I was supposed to be nothing.
"No."
The word slipped out—soft, broken. I forced it again, louder. "No. This is bullshit. This is wrong. There's been a fucking mistake."
The Librarian didn't flinch. Just stood there, eyes blinking in slow waves, like it had heard this a thousand times before.
A teenage girl. Angry. Disappointed. Dramatic.
It sighed—a low sound, like wind through ancient paper.
With weary patience, it reached out.
Slow. Unimpressed.
Expecting to take the book, flip through, and say the usual thing: You'll understand in time.
It wasn't curious.
It wasn't afraid.
It was tired.
With a flick of its too-long fingers, it plucked the lifebook from my hands—like taking a toy from a crying child.
"Let us see," it murmured, voice smooth, practiced, bored. "Perhaps there has been a—"
It opened the cover.
And froze.
A full, violent stillness, like the universe had snapped to attention.
Its fingers locked, tendons standing out like cables.
All those eyes snapped open.
Wide.
Unblinking.
Terrified.
The shifting face froze.
Not into shock.
Into something older.
Something primal.
Recognition.
It flipped a page.
Then another.
Each turn slower.
Each breath louder.
Until it reached the end.
And found nothing.
No future.
No path.
Just white.
And then—
It flinched.
A full-body recoil, like it had touched something alive and wrong.
The book trembled in its grip.
Not from my magic.
From its fucking fear.
"This is impossible," it whispered.
But not in that layered, echoing voice.
No.
This was flat.
Human.
Stunned.
Horrified.
"It is an absence."
"What?" I choked. "What the fuck does that mean? Fix it! Just—rewrite the damn thing!"
The Librarian didn't answer.
It just stared at me—through me—like I was a wound in the world.
And when it finally spoke again, the words were barely audible, trembling:
"You have been… excised."
Silence.
Dead fucking silence.
No breath. No rustle.
Every person in the room froze. Stared.
Not at the Librarian.
Not at the book.
At me.
And in that silence, I felt it—
Not grief.
Not confusion.
Just one cold, perfect truth, sharp as a scalpel, sliding between my ribs:
I wasn't just unwritten.
I was erased.
And if the universe had tried to delete me—
Then I'd burn the whole motherfucking thing down until it remembered my name.
The Librarian closed the book—slow, deliberate—and for the first time, I saw its fingers tremble. "There is no role. No path. No destiny. The Archive has no record of what you are meant to become. It is as if… you were never supposed to exist."
"Then make one!" I snarled, stepping forward, magic flaring in my chest like a caged beast. "You write the goddamn stories! You decide the roles! So give me one! Anything! Just fucking write it!"
"It does not work that way," the Librarian said, voice regaining its layered depth but strained, forcing itself back into form. "The lifebook does not assign. It reveals. It shows what has always been. And yours… yours resists revelation. It is not a flaw. It is a void. A narrative collapse. You are… unwritten."
"Unwritten?" I laughed—short, sharp, broken. "I've been writing my story since I was five! Every spell, every fight, every time I've fucking bled—that's my story! And you're telling me it doesn't count?"
"It counts," the Librarian said, quiet now. "But it does not belong. Your actions exist outside the narrative. You do not fit. You were never meant to. And now… the story has no place for you."
I looked down at my arm.
The tattoo had gone dark. Not grey. Not faded.
Black.
Like it had been burned the hell out.
And in the center, where the final glyph should have been—nothing.
Just a single, jagged line.
Like a scar.
Around me, whispers started.
"Excised?"
"Holy shit, never seen that before…"
"She's void-touched…"
"Dangerous…"
I turned. Slow.
My parents stood behind me, Mom's face pale, Dad's jaw clenched.
"Excised?" Dad's voice was steady, but I could hear the plates shifting underneath. "Lifebooks can't be excised. The system is infallible. You promised—"
"It is infallible," the Librarian agreed, and there was a new edge to its voice now. Sharp. Metallic. Afraid. "And yet. The record is not missing. It is an anti-record. A plot hole."
The words hung in the air, meaningless and utterly terrifying.
My mind raced. Someone had erased my future. Not stolen it—unwritten it. Destroyed everything I'd worked for, everything I deserved—
It wasn't just the future. It was the past. Every bloody knuckle, every night spent drilling—it had all been poured into a vessel someone had shattered.
Eighteen years, a prologue to fucking nothing.
My magic flared. I didn't mean for it to—but it came, a raw geyser of rage, crackling around my clenched fists in violent spasms of blue-white light.
"Who?" I snarled, the sound tearing from my throat. "Who the fuck did this?"
"I don't—" the Librarian started.
The book in its hands began to dissolve.
But this was all wrong.
The light that rose wasn't golden. It was corrupted—flickering between colors that didn't have names, stuttering like a broken memory. It rose toward me anyway, drawn by the binding magic.
My incomplete tattoo began to burn.
Not warm. Burning. Like a brand of pure nullification against my damn soul.
I gasped, clutching my arm, and watched as the corrupted light seared into my skin. The elegant runes twisted, distorted, glitched. Some filled with jagged script. Some stayed blank. Others flickered at the edges.
When the light faded, my tattoo looked like a corrupted file given physical form.
A goddamn wound.
And that's when the alarms started.
The sound hit me like a physical force—a high-pitched, discordant shriek that tasted of static and burnt ozone. It vibrated in the fillings of my teeth, in my skull.
The sound of a system detecting a fatal error.
The marble floor beneath my feet sighed.
Then it cracked. A massive, organic fracture spread outward from where I stood. The white stone split, revealing not earth, but a deep, starless darkness underneath that seemed to gaze back up.
The air around me started to shimmer and bleed.
Not like heat off pavement.
Like reality itself was tearing at the seams. Colors dulled, then inverted. The polished marble turned matte, then translucent, then briefly unwritten, as if the very idea of stone had been questioned.
And the darkness below—
It wasn't empty.
It watched.
Not with eyes. With awareness. A presence so vast it pulsed, slow and deep, like the heartbeat of a buried god.
The Librarian dropped the remains of the book. It didn't fall. It unraveled—pages dissolving into ash, ink bleeding upward like smoke.
"You weren't erased," it whispered, voice trembling, stripped of certainty. "You were excised from causality. No past. No future. No because. You exist outside the chain of consequence. You are—"
"Impossible?" I hissed.
"No," it said. "Worse."
A beat.
Then: "Unaccounted."
The word landed like a curse.
I understood.
They hadn't just deleted my lifebook.
They'd tried to delete the reason for it. The memory that I had ever been promised anything.
They hadn't just taken my fate.
They'd tried to make the world forget it had ever owed me one.
And that's when I felt it—
Not pain.
Recognition.
The darkness below didn't just watch.
It knew me.
As if something down there had been waiting. As if my absence had been a key, and now, the lock was turning.
The corrupted light pulsed beneath my skin, but now it didn't feel like an invasion.
It felt like a fucking awakening.
The runes on my arm—twisted, broken—began to move. Not healing.
Rewriting.
Letters that had never been spoken. A language older than the Archive, carving itself into my flesh with no hand but necessity.
The alarms didn't stop.
They evolved.
The shriek deepened, warped into something else—not a siren, but a chant. A chorus of voices, layered and dissonant, speaking in reverse, in tongues, in silence, reciting a single phrase over and over, not in warning—
But in summons.
They weren't alarms.
They were bells.
Ringing for the return of something lost.
Something forbidden.
Something mine.
The cracks in the floor spread faster, racing toward the walls. Where they touched, the stone didn't just break. It forgot itself. Carvings of fate-lines, runes of continuity—dissolving into fine, black dust that swirled upward like ink.
"Contain her!" the Librarian's voice boomed, no longer layered but singular and raw with panic. "The plot hole is destabilizing the local narrative! She must be quarantined!"
From the shadows of the temple, from corners that unfolded into new spaces, things emerged.
Not guards.
Archivists.
The Librarian's minions. Grey robes moving with nightmarish, synchronized precision, hoods shadowing faceless voids. Dozens of them. Flooding the goddamn chamber.
Mom screamed. Dad lunged forward, a human shield—
But my body was already moving on eighteen years of brutal instinct.
I didn't think. Just moved.
Magic detonated from me—raw, uncontrolled. The first minion that reached for me didn't just get blasted back; it dissolved in a shower of grey static before reforming, stumbling. The blast hit a marble pillar, and the stone didn't just crack—it unmade in a localized sphere, leaving a perfect, smooth hemisphere of nothing.
"HOLLY, STOP!" Mom's shriek was barely audible.
I couldn't stop. The void where my future should be was howling inside me.
Another minion came from the left. I spun, a barrier spell manifesting as a plane of fractured light. It shattered on impact, sending shards of hardened force into three others. They went down, their forms glitching.
More were coming. An endless tide of grey.
The temple doors—massive, ornate, sealed—were my only exit. I channeled a torrent of magic into my legs and ran.
My boots hit the marble and the stone briefly turned to gossamer, then to screaming ice, then back. I ran through the chaos.
The doors were thirty feet away. Twenty. Ten.
I didn't slow down.
I gathered the writhing, unstable power within me—the power that had nowhere to go—and slammed it into the world at the point of the doors.
They didn't just explode. They unfolded. Wood, metal, and intricate carvings twisted inside out in a silent, impossible geometry before erupting into a cloud of splinters and shimmering dust.
I shot through the gap into blinding daylight.
Behind me, the Librarian's voice shook the city:
"FIND HER! THE VOID MUST BE COLLAPSED!"
I hit the street at a full sprint, and the world broke around me in waves.
Cobblestones rippled like water under my boots. A woman dropped a basket; oranges rolled and then multiplied, becoming a glitching cascade before vanishing. The smell of the air flickered between bakery-sweet and the acrid tang of a lightning strike. Windows reflected not my face, but shifting, fragmented memories from the crowd—a child's first step, a lover's kiss—all stolen, unanchored, mine now.
I was a tear in the page, and the ink was fucking bleeding.
I ducked and wove through the panicking crowd, a ghost leaving a wake of reality sickness. Behind me, grey robes poured from the temple, a silent, spreading stain.
An alley, narrow and dark, yawned to my right. I cut into it, skidding on gravel that momentarily felt like glass.
Halfway through, I froze.
A grey robe stood at the far end. Motionless.
I spun.
Two more blocked the entrance.
I was trapped.
My magic crackled, wild. The brick walls shimmered, their edges becoming non-Euclidean.
"Come peacefully," the one ahead intoned, voice a flat, dead audio file. "The anomaly will be studied. You will not be harmed."
Studied. A specimen. A bug pinned to a card labeled Error.
"Fuck. That," I snarled.
I had never attempted a spell of this magnitude. It was suicide. But I had no future to preserve.
I slammed my palms against the shuddering brick wall. I poured every ounce of my eighteen years, every shred of my rage, every pulse of the unstable void in my chest, into a single, devastating command: UNMAKE.
The world hiccuped.
Then the wall, and a significant portion of the buildings it belonged to, simply ceased to be coherent.
It wasn't an explosion. It was a localized narrative collapse. Brick, mortar, wood, and glass dissolved into a cloud of constituent parts that hung in the air before pathetically raining down.
I didn't wait. I dove through the gaping hole where reality had been.
I tumbled into a potter's shop, rolling across a smooth wood floor, my shoulder connecting with a table leg with a sickening crunch. I felt the tear of fabric as much as I heard it—my fitted grey button-down ripping open at the seam, the sleeve hanging by threads. White-hot pain blinded me.
A woman shrieked. As I scrambled up, my good hand snagged a heavy, waxed canvas apron hanging on a hook by the door—stained with clay and grit. I didn't think. I shoved my arms through the straps, the coarse fabric covering my torn shirt, and burst back into the street. The apron wasn't armor, but it was a layer between me and the world trying to erase me.
I burst into another street. Right into a line of three grey robes.
No more running. This ended here.
I raised my good hand, magic coalescing into a spear of fractured light—
The air to my left ripped.
A tear in the world, stitched with black thread. Through it, I saw a distorted version of this street, empty and raining upwards. The grey robes flinched.
I ran. Not away, but past them, through the distortion. My body passed through the tear, and for a moment I was nowhere, bodiless, before spilling out into a grimy courtyard five blocks away.
The glitch had teleported me. What the hell.
I stumbled, vomited bile onto the cobblestones. My shoulder was a universe of agony. My tattoo burned. The air was thick with rot and wild magic.
Errata. The slum where the broken things collected.
I took one step. My ankle, twisted in the fall, buckled.
I caught myself on a soot-stained wall, breathing in ragged, wet gasps. Blood from my scraped palm smeared the brick. I was spent. Hollowed out. The adrenaline was gone, leaving only the crushing weight: I was nobody. I was nothing. An error code walking.
I looked down at myself. My right sleeve was torn clean from the shoulder seam, the ragged grey fabric flapping. The apron was streaked with new filth. The polished blade of my left boot was scuffed to hell; the right one had a deep gash in the leather, like a mouth trying to speak. The whole "presentable" lie was in tatters. It was a banner of my old, failed life.
With a grunt of pain, I used my good hand to yank at the remains of the button-down. Buttons pinged off the cobblestones. I stripped it off, leaving only the black tank top beneath. The crisp grey cloth was a promise the world had broken. I let it fall into a puddle of something unidentifiable. Then, I untied the stiff, filthy potter's apron and let it drop too. It had served its purpose.
I stood there in my tank top, the cold air biting my skin, feeling more naked than I ever had in my life. Not just my arms bare. My future was bare. My past was invalidated. I was just… meat and magic and a screaming void.
A glint on the ground caught my eye. A long, ash-grey scarf one of the locals must have dropped, half-tangled in the rubble. It smelled of smoke and cheap incense. I picked it up, the fabric rough against my fingers. I didn't think about it. I just wrapped it around my neck and pulled the dangling ends through a belt loop on my black pants, tying it off into a crude knot. It wasn't a uniform. It wasn't a ceremony outfit. It was a patch job. A declaration.
The old Holly Quillen was dead in the temple. Whatever this was, was being built from scraps.
I made it two more limping blocks before they found me.
Not grey robes. Worse.
The natives. Three men, two women, emerging from the architectural scars. Their magic crackled—unstable, violent. Burn scars, twitching limbs, hungry eyes. Predators who recognized dying prey.
"Well, well," a man with scarred arms rasped, his grin a cemetery. "The temple's throwing out fresh trash. You lost, sweetheart?"
I was too empty for fury. Too broken for fear. I leaned against the wall, a symphony of pain. "I'm not lost," I whispered, my voice raw. "I'm fucking nowhere."
They laughed. The sound was the most real thing I'd heard in hours.
The scarred man stepped forward. "Big words for a—"
I moved. Not with grace, but with the desperate jerk of a cornered animal. My magic responded as a spasm. I didn't hit him. The space between us convulsed.
He flickered sideways, his lunge passing through where I had been as I glitched half a foot to the left. His companion fired a bolt of wild energy. It veered, drawn to the instability around me, and hit a wall that momentarily had the consistency of water.
This wasn't a fight. It was a chaotic meltdown, and I was the epicenter.
I swung my good arm at a woman. My fist passed through her flickering form. I overbalanced. My ankle screamed, and I went down on one knee.
The scarred man recovered, murder in his eyes. "You glitching bitch—"
More people gathered, drawn by the chaos. They watched, whispers slithering.
"Look at her arm…"
"Plot hole…"
"Reality's sick around her…"
The glitches worsened. The ground rippled like liquid. Colors bled. I was leaking corruption into the world, and I couldn't stop it.
The man lunged, magic coalescing into a crude hammer of force.
I had nothing left to block it with.
"I really wouldn't do that if I were you."
The voice was smooth, amused, and came from everywhere and nowhere.
The scarred man faltered, the spell fizzling.
A man leaned against a doorway I would have sworn was solid wall a moment before. Tall, maybe mid-twenties, dark hair artfully disheveled. A long black coat, absurdly pristine. Hands in his pockets, posture relaxed. He was smiling, but it was cold, a transaction. His eyes—a strange, shifting grey-green—held no warmth, only sharp, analytical interest. The glitches around me seemed to calm slightly in his vicinity.
"Who the hell are you?" I croaked.
"Name's Mal." He pushed off the wall with lazy grace. "And you, sweetheart, are about to paint a very large target on this entire block. The Librarian's hounds are sniffing for anomalies. You're not just an anomaly. You're a screaming, bleeding beacon." He gestured at the shimmering air. "So. You can stay here, finish this charming scrap, and wait for the grey to sweep in and scoop you up for dissection…"
He nodded toward a narrow, dark alley behind him.
"…or you can follow me, and I'll show you how to not get erased from the story entirely."
Every instinct screamed trap. This man was danger wrapped in a smirk. But the glitches were a lighthouse beam. The grey robes were coming. I had no strength, no future, and no damn options.
I pushed myself up, my body protesting. I stumbled toward him. My brown eyes, bloodshot and desperate, locked onto his cold ones.
"Fine," I spat, the word tasting of ash. "But if you call me sweetheart again, I will use the last of my magic to make you forget how to swallow. Understood, asshole?"
His smile widened, a flash of genuine, terrifying delight.
"Crystal clear," he said.
Then he turned and walked into the alley's gloom, not looking back.
I took a ragged breath, the air tasting of ozone and my own failure, and limped after him into the dark.
Because what other goddamn story did I have left?
Love this version; the voice is still very much alive. Below is a light-touch edit: repetition trimmed, some profanity kept for punch and cut where it's doing less work. Feel free to swap any choices back.
***
I'd spent eighteen years preparing for greatness.
Eighteen years of cracked knuckles, split lips from biting down during silent incantations, and drilling somatic sequences so precise they could crack a fortress's spine with a flick of the wrist.
While my classmates were still jerking their hands like amateurs trying to make party lights flicker, I didn't sleep—I worked. My hands didn't shake from exhaustion; they trembled, alive with the raw, leftover voltage of magic I'd spent half my life learning to cage. To control. To wield like a scalpel.
While the rest of them whined about their "ethical boundaries" and "balance," I was already three steps ahead, calculating the exact moment a training dummy's core would shatter under sustained assault.
Magic wasn't some gentle art or mystical dance.
It was dominance. It was precision.
It was being the one motherfucker in the room who didn't flinch when the air started to scream.
Because I knew—deep in my bones, in the pulse of my blood, in the quiet, unshakable certainty that had carried me through every bruise, every failure, every time some smug instructor said, "Holly, you're too much"—that when I turned eighteen and got my lifebook, those pages wouldn't just be filled with some bullshit role like "Archival Assistant" or "Minor Ward Technician."
They'd ignite.
They'd burn with purpose. With power. With a destiny so undeniable it would shut every doubter the hell up.
This was my proof. My vindication.
The moment the world would finally see what I'd always known:
I wasn't just strong. I wasn't just skilled.
I was meant for something monstrous.
Something legendary.
***
The morning of my birthday, I stood in front of the bathroom mirror, yanking at the collar of my shirt like it was trying to choke me.
I'd reluctantly agreed to wear something "presentable" for the ceremony—black pants, a fitted grey button-down, my best combat boots polished until they gleamed like blades—but I'd drawn the line at a dress. Mom had tried, with that soft, hopeful look, like this was some sweet rite of passage.
Fuck that. I wasn't playing nice. I'd won that damn fight.
My ash-blonde hair fell in its usual choppy waves, just past my chin, uneven from where I'd hacked it myself last week. I tucked one side behind my ear with an irritated huff, fingers brushing the small, pale scar that notched my chin—a souvenir from a kinetic spell that got away from me at twelve.
My brown eyes locked onto my reflection—sharp, focused, ravenous.
Today was the goddamn day.
All the sacrifices, the loneliness, the endless repetition—it would all be worth it. Because today, my lifebook would open, and my future would be written in ink that didn't fade, didn't waver, didn't lie.
On my forearm, the incomplete tattoo—the one every kid got at birth, a living script that recorded the first eighteen years—pulsed, warm beneath my skin. I traced a finger over the elegant runic script, feeling the subtle hum of magic embedded in my flesh.
A quiet promise.
By tonight, it would be complete. By tonight, the final glyphs would form, and I would finally know—exactly—what I was destined to become.
And everyone—my instructors, my peers, the elders—everyone knew.
Holly Quillen wasn't just going to be great.
She was going to be a fucking legend.
—
The ceremony room in the Librarian's temple stretched out before me like something ripped from a goddamn fever dream.
White marble floors so polished they reflected the impossible light like liquid silver. Light that didn't come from anywhere but just was, hanging in the air. The ceiling vanished into shadows so deep they might as well have been the edge of reality.
At the center of it all stood the Librarian.
This thing wasn't human.
Not even close.
It stood too tall—seven feet? Ten? Who the hell could tell when its edges rippled like heat off asphalt. Its robes weren't fabric—they were pages, thousands of them, stitched together into flowing layers that rustled without a breath of wind, whispering. Its face kept shifting, like a screen flickering between faces: sharp cheekbones one second, soft and round the next, never settling.
And the eyes.
Oh, holy shit, the eyes.
They opened and closed across its face, its neck, even its hands—dozens of them, blinking in staggered rhythms.
All of them watching.
But I didn't flinch.
I wasn't about to let some cosmic librarian make me feel small.
Around the room, other eighteen-year-olds waited with their families. A girl near the front bounced on her toes, grinning. A boy to my right looked like he was one breath from puking on his shiny shoes.
I just looked ready. I looked like hell yeah.
My parents stood behind me. Mom's hand rested warm on my shoulder, a tremor in her fingers. Dad stood solid, arms crossed. When I glanced back, he gave me that small, firm nod—the one he always did before a fight.
I believe in you.
"Mira Castellanos," the Librarian intoned, its voice a layered echo, like the walls themselves were speaking.
A girl stepped forward. The Librarian's too-long fingers—too many joints—plucked a book from thin air. She took it, opened it—
Her face lit up. Tears spilled. The book dissolved into a cascade of golden light, swirling around her before sinking into her skin, her tattoo flaring to life in elegant, flowing script.
One down.
Dozens more to go.
I waited, jaw clenched so tight my teeth ached, while name after name was called. Watched lives unfold. Some cried with happiness. Some looked stunned. One boy's face went bone-white as leaden grey script crawled across his arm—Archive Tender, Level Three. His mother caught him as he stumbled, her face tight with quiet horror.
And then—
The air shifted.
The whispers died.
The light dimmed, like the whole damn world was holding its breath.
The Librarian turned its shifting face toward me.
"Holly Quillen."
My boots clicked against the marble—sharp, steady—as I stepped forward.
Let them fucking stare. Let them remember.
The Librarian extended a hand, and a book appeared.
Leather-bound. Pristine. My name in gold across the cover, shimmering like they were alive, like they knew me.
Holly Quillen.
My lifebook.
My breath caught, just once, but my hands didn't shake as I reached for it. The second my fingers brushed the cover, warmth surged through my palm—deep, resonant, like a key sliding into a lock that had been waiting.
Not magic. Recognition.
I took it.
It was heavier than it should've been. Not with paper. With weight. Like it carried every broken nail, every sleepless night I'd poured into this moment.
The Librarian stepped back. Silent. Watching. All those eyes fixed on me.
I opened it.
First page: my birth. Runic script glowed, translating in my mind: Born winter solstice. First cry at dawn. Mother's joy. Father's pride.
I flipped.
Five years old—first spark of magic, a tiny blue flame on my fingertip.
Ten—accepted into advanced training, youngest in a decade.
Twelve—first combat win. I'd broken a boy's wrist. Didn't apologize. Still don't.
Fifteen—mastered a seventh-tier kinetic spell. Instructors called it "impossible."
I called it fucking Tuesday.
Page after page, my life unspooled in perfect, beautiful detail. Every bruise. Every victory. Every time I'd been told I was too much—and proved their asses right.
My throat tightened. This was it. This was proof.
And then—
I turned to the page marking my eighteenth birthday.
Nothing.
Just… blank.
White fucking space.
I blinked. Stared.
Turned the page.
Blank.
Another.
Blank.
My hands started to shake.
I flipped faster—harder—pages flying under my fingers like I could outrun the emptiness—
But it was all nothing.
Every single fucking page after today—blank.
No title. No path. No purpose.
Just white.
And the worst part?
The book didn't feel surprised.
It just sat there, warm and heavy and complete—like this was exactly how it was supposed to be.
Like I was supposed to be nothing.
"No."
The word slipped out—soft, broken. I forced it again, louder. "No. This is bullshit. This is wrong. There's been a fucking mistake."
The Librarian didn't flinch. Just stood there, eyes blinking in slow waves, like it had heard this a thousand times before.
A teenage girl. Angry. Disappointed. Dramatic.
It sighed—a low sound, like wind through ancient paper.
With weary patience, it reached out.
Slow. Unimpressed.
Expecting to take the book, flip through, and say the usual thing: You'll understand in time.
It wasn't curious.
It wasn't afraid.
It was tired.
With a flick of its too-long fingers, it plucked the lifebook from my hands—like taking a toy from a crying child.
"Let us see," it murmured, voice smooth, practiced, bored. "Perhaps there has been a—"
It opened the cover.
And froze.
A full, violent stillness, like the universe had snapped to attention.
Its fingers locked, tendons standing out like cables.
All those eyes snapped open.
Wide.
Unblinking.
Terrified.
The shifting face froze.
Not into shock.
Into something older.
Something primal.
Recognition.
It flipped a page.
Then another.
Each turn slower.
Each breath louder.
Until it reached the end.
And found nothing.
No future.
No path.
Just white.
And then—
It flinched.
A full-body recoil, like it had touched something alive and wrong.
The book trembled in its grip.
Not from my magic.
From its fear.
"This is impossible," it whispered.
But not in that layered, echoing voice.
No.
This was flat.
Human.
Stunned.
Horrified.
"It is an absence."
"What?" I choked. "What the fuck does that mean? Fix it! Just—rewrite the damn thing!"
The Librarian didn't answer.
It just stared at me—through me—like I was a wound in the world.
And when it finally spoke again, the words were barely audible, trembling:
"You have been… excised."
Silence.
Dead fucking silence.
No breath. No rustle.
Every person in the room froze. Stared.
Not at the Librarian.
Not at the book.
At me.
And in that silence, I felt it—
Not grief.
Not confusion.
Just one cold, perfect truth, sharp as a scalpel, sliding between my ribs:
I wasn't just unwritten.
I was erased.
And if the universe had tried to delete me—
Then I'd burn the whole motherfucking thing down until it remembered my name.
The Librarian closed the book—slow, deliberate—and for the first time, I saw its fingers tremble. "There is no role. No path. No destiny. The Archive has no record of what you are meant to become. It is as if… you were never supposed to exist."
"Then make one!" I snarled, stepping forward, magic flaring in my chest like a caged beast. "You write the goddamn stories! You decide the roles! So give me one! Anything! Just fucking write it!"
"It does not work that way," the Librarian said, voice regaining its layered depth but strained, forcing itself back into form. "The lifebook does not assign. It reveals. It shows what has always been. And yours… yours resists revelation. It is not a flaw. It is a void. A narrative collapse. You are… unwritten."
"Unwritten?" I laughed—short, sharp, broken. "I've been writing my story since I was five! Every spell, every fight, every time I've fucking bled—that's my story! And you're telling me it doesn't count?"
"It counts," the Librarian said, quiet now. "But it does not belong. Your actions exist outside the narrative. You do not fit. You were never meant to. And now… the story has no place for you."
I looked down at my arm.
The tattoo had gone dark. Not grey. Not faded.
Black.
Like it had been burned the hell out.
And in the center, where the final glyph should have been—nothing.
Just a single, jagged line.
Like a scar.
Around me, whispers started.
"Excised?"
"Holy shit, never seen that before…"
"She's void-touched…"
"Dangerous…"
I turned. Slow.
My parents stood behind me, Mom's face pale, Dad's jaw clenched.
"Excised?" Dad's voice was steady, but I could hear the plates shifting underneath. "Lifebooks can't be excised. The system is infallible. You promised—"
"It is infallible," the Librarian agreed, and there was a new edge to its voice now. Sharp. Metallic. Afraid. "And yet. The record is not missing. It is an anti-record. A plot hole."
The words hung in the air, meaningless and utterly terrifying.
My mind raced. Someone had erased my future. Not stolen it—unwritten it. Destroyed everything I'd worked for, everything I deserved—
It wasn't just the future. It was the past. Every bloody knuckle, every night spent drilling—it had all been poured into a vessel someone had shattered.
Eighteen years, a prologue to fucking nothing.
My magic flared. I didn't mean for it to—but it came, a raw geyser of rage, crackling around my clenched fists in violent spasms of blue-white light.
"Who?" I snarled, the sound tearing from my throat. "Who the fuck did this?"
"I don't—" the Librarian started.
The book in its hands began to dissolve.
But this was all wrong.
The light that rose wasn't golden. It was corrupted—flickering between colors that didn't have names, stuttering like a broken memory. It rose toward me anyway, drawn by the binding magic.
My incomplete tattoo began to burn.
Not warm. Burning. Like a brand of pure nullification against my damn soul.
I gasped, clutching my arm, and watched as the corrupted light seared into my skin. The elegant runes twisted, distorted, glitched. Some filled with jagged script. Some stayed blank. Others flickered at the edges.
When the light faded, my tattoo looked like a corrupted file given physical form.
A goddamn wound.
And that's when the alarms started.
The sound hit me like a physical force—a high-pitched, discordant shriek that tasted of static and burnt ozone. It vibrated in the fillings of my teeth, in my skull.
The sound of a system detecting a fatal error.
The marble floor beneath my feet sighed.
Then it cracked. A massive, organic fracture spread outward from where I stood. The white stone split, revealing not earth, but a deep, starless darkness underneath that seemed to gaze back up.
The air around me started to shimmer and bleed.
Not like heat off pavement.
Like reality itself was tearing at the seams. Colors dulled, then inverted. The polished marble turned matte, then translucent, then briefly unwritten, as if the very idea of stone had been questioned.
And the darkness below—
It wasn't empty.
It watched.
Not with eyes. With awareness. A presence so vast it pulsed, slow and deep, like the heartbeat of a buried god.
The Librarian dropped the remains of the book. It didn't fall. It unraveled—pages dissolving into ash, ink bleeding upward like smoke.
"You weren't erased," it whispered, voice trembling, stripped of certainty. "You were excised from causality. No past. No future. No because. You exist outside the chain of consequence. You are—"
"Impossible?" I hissed.
"No," it said. "Worse."
A beat.
Then: "Unaccounted."
The word landed like a curse.
I understood.
They hadn't just deleted my lifebook.
They'd tried to delete the reason for it. The memory that I had ever been promised anything.
They hadn't just taken my fate.
They'd tried to make the world forget it had ever owed me one.
And that's when I felt it—
Not pain.
Recognition.
The darkness below didn't just watch.
It knew me.
As if something down there had been waiting. As if my absence had been a key, and now, the lock was turning.
The corrupted light pulsed beneath my skin, but now it didn't feel like an invasion.
It felt like a fucking awakening.
The runes on my arm—twisted, broken—began to move. Not healing.
Rewriting.
Letters that had never been spoken. A language older than the Archive, carving itself into my flesh with no hand but necessity.
The alarms didn't stop.
They evolved.
The shriek deepened, warped into something else—not a siren, but a chant. A chorus of voices, layered and dissonant, speaking in reverse, in tongues, in silence, reciting a single phrase over and over, not in warning—
But in summons.
They weren't alarms.
They were bells.
Ringing for the return of something lost.
Something forbidden.
Something mine.
The cracks in the floor spread faster, racing toward the walls. Where they touched, the stone didn't just break. It forgot itself. Carvings of fate-lines, runes of continuity—dissolving into fine, black dust that swirled upward like ink.
"Contain her!" the Librarian's voice boomed, no longer layered but singular and raw with panic. "The plot hole is destabilizing the local narrative! She must be quarantined!"
From the shadows of the temple, from corners that unfolded into new spaces, things emerged.
Not guards.
Archivists.
The Librarian's minions. Grey robes moving with nightmarish, synchronized precision, hoods shadowing faceless voids. Dozens of them. Flooding the goddamn chamber.
Mom screamed. Dad lunged forward, a human shield—
But my body was already moving on eighteen years of brutal instinct.
I didn't think. Just moved.
Magic detonated from me—raw, uncontrolled. The first minion that reached for me didn't just get blasted back; it dissolved in a shower of grey static before reforming, stumbling. The blast hit a marble pillar, and the stone didn't just crack—it unmade in a localized sphere, leaving a perfect, smooth hemisphere of nothing.
"HOLLY, STOP!" Mom's shriek was barely audible.
I couldn't stop. The void where my future should be was howling inside me.
Another minion came from the left. I spun, a barrier spell manifesting as a plane of fractured light. It shattered on impact, sending shards of hardened force into three others. They went down, their forms glitching.
More were coming. An endless tide of grey.
The temple doors—massive, ornate, sealed—were my only exit. I channeled a torrent of magic into my legs and ran.
My boots hit the marble and the stone briefly turned to gossamer, then to screaming ice, then back. I ran through the chaos.
The doors were thirty feet away. Twenty. Ten.
I didn't slow down.
I gathered the writhing, unstable power within me—the power that had nowhere to go—and slammed it into the world at the point of the doors.
They didn't just explode. They unfolded. Wood, metal, and intricate carvings twisted inside out in a silent, impossible geometry before erupting into a cloud of splinters and shimmering dust.
I shot through the gap into blinding daylight.
Behind me, the Librarian's voice shook the city:
"FIND HER! THE VOID MUST BE COLLAPSED!"
I hit the street at a full sprint, and the world broke around me in waves.
Cobblestones rippled like water under my boots. A woman dropped a basket; oranges rolled and then multiplied, becoming a glitching cascade before vanishing. The smell of the air flickered between bakery-sweet and the acrid tang of a lightning strike. Windows reflected not my face, but shifting, fragmented memories from the crowd—a child's first step, a lover's kiss—all stolen, unanchored, mine now.
I was a tear in the page, and the ink was fucking bleeding.
I ducked and wove through the panicking crowd, a ghost leaving a wake of reality sickness. Behind me, grey robes poured from the temple, a silent, spreading stain.
An alley, narrow and dark, yawned to my right. I cut into it, skidding on gravel that momentarily felt like glass.
Halfway through, I froze.
A grey robe stood at the far end. Motionless.
I spun.
Two more blocked the entrance.
I was trapped.
My magic crackled, wild. The brick walls shimmered, their edges becoming non-Euclidean.
"Come peacefully," the one ahead intoned, voice a flat, dead audio file. "The anomaly will be studied. You will not be harmed."
Studied. A specimen. A bug pinned to a card labeled Error.
"Fuck. That," I snarled.
I had never attempted a spell of this magnitude. It was suicide. But I had no future to preserve.
I slammed my palms against the shuddering brick wall. I poured every ounce of my eighteen years, every shred of my rage, every pulse of the unstable void in my chest, into a single, devastating command: UNMAKE.
The world hiccuped.
Then the wall, and a significant portion of the buildings it belonged to, simply ceased to be coherent.
It wasn't an explosion. It was a localized narrative collapse. Brick, mortar, wood, and glass dissolved into a cloud of constituent parts that hung in the air before pathetically raining down.
I didn't wait. I dove through the gaping hole where reality had been.
I tumbled into a potter's shop, rolling across a smooth wood floor, my shoulder connecting with a table leg with a sickening crunch. I felt the tear of fabric as much as I heard it—my fitted grey button-down ripping open at the seam, the sleeve hanging by threads. White-hot pain blinded me.
A woman shrieked. As I scrambled up, my good hand snagged a heavy, waxed canvas apron hanging on a hook by the door—stained with clay and grit. I didn't think. I shoved my arms through the straps, the coarse fabric covering my torn shirt, and burst back into the street. The apron wasn't armor, but it was a layer between me and the world trying to erase me.
I burst into another street. Right into a line of three grey robes.
No more running. This ended here.
I raised my good hand, magic coalescing into a spear of fractured light—
The air to my left ripped.
A tear in the world, stitched with black thread. Through it, I saw a distorted version of this street, empty and raining upwards. The grey robes flinched.
I ran. Not away, but past them, through the distortion. My body passed through the tear, and for a moment I was nowhere, bodiless, before spilling out into a grimy courtyard five blocks away.
The glitch had teleported me. What the hell.
I stumbled, vomited bile onto the cobblestones. My shoulder was a universe of agony. My tattoo burned. The air was thick with rot and wild magic.
Errata. The slum where the broken things collected.
I took one step. My ankle, twisted in the fall, buckled.
I caught myself on a soot-stained wall, breathing in ragged, wet gasps. Blood from my scraped palm smeared the brick. I was spent. Hollowed out. The adrenaline was gone, leaving only the crushing weight: I was nobody. I was nothing. An error code walking.
I looked down at myself. My right sleeve was torn clean from the shoulder seam, the ragged grey fabric flapping. The apron was streaked with new filth. The polished blade of my left boot was scuffed to hell; the right one had a deep gash in the leather, like a mouth trying to speak. The whole "presentable" lie was in tatters. It was a banner of my old, failed life.
With a grunt of pain, I used my good hand to yank at the remains of the button-down. Buttons pinged off the cobblestones. I stripped it off, leaving only the black tank top beneath. The crisp grey cloth was a promise the world had broken. I let it fall into a puddle of something unidentifiable. Then, I untied the stiff, filthy potter's apron and let it drop too. It had served its purpose.
I stood there in my tank top, the cold air biting my skin, feeling more naked than I ever had in my life. Not just my arms bare. My future was bare. My past was invalidated. I was just… meat and magic and a screaming void.
A glint on the ground caught my eye. A long, ash-grey scarf one of the locals must have dropped, half-tangled in the rubble. It smelled of smoke and cheap incense. I picked it up, the fabric rough against my fingers. I didn't think about it. I just wrapped it around my neck and pulled the dangling ends through a belt loop on my black pants, tying it off into a crude knot. It wasn't a uniform. It wasn't a ceremony outfit. It was a patch job. A declaration.
The old Holly Quillen was dead in the temple. Whatever this was, was being built from scraps.
I made it two more limping blocks before they found me.
Not grey robes. Worse.
The natives. Three men, two women, emerging from the architectural scars. Their magic crackled—unstable, violent. Burn scars, twitching limbs, hungry eyes. Predators who recognized dying prey.
"Well, well," a man with scarred arms rasped, his grin a cemetery. "The temple's throwing out fresh trash. You lost, sweetheart?"
I was too empty for fury. Too broken for fear. I leaned against the wall, a symphony of pain. "I'm not lost," I whispered, my voice raw. "I'm fucking nowhere."
They laughed. The sound was the most real thing I'd heard in hours.
The scarred man stepped forward. "Big words for a—"
I moved. Not with grace, but with the desperate jerk of a cornered animal. My magic responded as a spasm. I didn't hit him. The space between us convulsed.
He flickered sideways, his lunge passing through where I had been as I glitched half a foot to the left. His companion fired a bolt of wild energy. It veered, drawn to the instability around me, and hit a wall that momentarily had the consistency of water.
This wasn't a fight. It was a chaotic meltdown, and I was the epicenter.
I swung my good arm at a woman. My fist passed through her flickering form. I overbalanced. My ankle screamed, and I went down on one knee.
The scarred man recovered, murder in his eyes. "You glitching bitch—"
More people gathered, drawn by the chaos. They watched, whispers slithering.
"Look at her arm…"
"Plot hole…"
"Reality's sick around her…"
The glitches worsened. The ground rippled like liquid. Colors bled. I was leaking corruption into the world, and I couldn't stop it.
The man lunged, magic coalescing into a crude hammer of force.
I had nothing left to block it with.
"I really wouldn't do that if I were you."
The voice was smooth, amused, and came from everywhere and nowhere.
The scarred man faltered, the spell fizzling.
A man leaned against a doorway I would have sworn was solid wall a moment before. Tall, maybe mid-twenties, dark hair artfully disheveled. A long black coat, absurdly pristine. Hands in his pockets, posture relaxed. He was smiling, but it was cold, a transaction. His eyes—a strange, shifting grey-green—held no warmth, only sharp, analytical interest. The glitches around me seemed to calm slightly in his vicinity.
"Who the hell are you?" I croaked.
"Name's Mal." He pushed off the wall with lazy grace. "And you, sweetheart, are about to paint a very large target on this entire block. The Librarian's hounds are sniffing for anomalies. You're not just an anomaly. You're a screaming, bleeding beacon." He gestured at the shimmering air. "So. You can stay here, finish this charming scrap, and wait for the grey to sweep in and scoop you up for dissection…"
He nodded toward a narrow, dark alley behind him.
"…or you can follow me, and I'll show you how to not get erased from the story entirely."
Every instinct screamed trap. This man was danger wrapped in a smirk. But the glitches were a lighthouse beam. The grey robes were coming. I had no strength, no future, and no damn options.
I pushed myself up, my body protesting. I stumbled toward him. My brown eyes, bloodshot and desperate, locked onto his cold ones.
"Fine," I spat, the word tasting of ash. "But if you call me sweetheart again, I will use the last of my magic to make you forget how to swallow. Understood, asshole?"
His smile widened, a flash of genuine, terrifying delight.
"Crystal clear," he said.
Then he turned and walked into the alley's gloom, not looking back.
I took a ragged breath, the air tasting of ozone and my own failure, and limped after him into the dark.
Because what other goddamn story did I have left?