The ink pulsed against Echo's skin like a second heartbeat.
It was subtle, at first – like a rhythm you notice only after silence. But now, it whispered behind his eyes, the paragraph's cadence leaking memories he hadn't lived. Images bled into his thoughts: a voice that always asked "why," a city where clocks ticked backward, a mother who was never born.
None of it was his.
But all of it felt like grief.
Ash watched him with narrowed eyes. "You're muttering."
"I'm not."
"You are. Something about mirrors and mouths full of thread."
Echo blinked. "...I didn't say that."
Curata looked back. "That fragment you absorbed – maybe it's not passive."
"It's dreaming," Echo said. "Dreams don't obey structure. They bleed."
Ash muttered, "So do we."
They descended from the Archive's shelves into a shallow glade between metaphors. It looked like a story had tried to happen there, but the scene had been cut.
Props remained: a cracked lantern, a pair of abandoned boots, a sword stabbed into a stone not meant for it.
And something stranger – emotion hovered in the air.
Raw. Undefined. Like the ghost of a feeling that had nowhere to go.
Echo stepped into it and staggered.
His knees hit the ground.
He was inside something else now – a character's final moment, written but never concluded.
She had stood on this very spot.
She had raised her sword.
She had asked, "If no one remembers me… was I ever real?"
Then the page had ended.
And she had been left behind.
Echo's voice cracked. "She didn't even get a name."
The others said nothing.
There was no battle here. No enemy.
Just the echo of a death scene that never finished writing itself.
They left quickly.
The margin thinned behind them. The Canon loomed ahead again – more stable, stricter.
And yet… something followed.
They didn't hear it.
They felt it.
Curata turned. Her fingers danced on the hilt of her blade. "We're not alone."
From behind a bent ridge of paper-fold hills, something emerged.
It wore no face.
Its body was made of revisions – whole lines struck through and layered again. Its spine was warped by footnotes. Its arms ended in red-ink claws. And across its chest, the half-torn label:
"Outline v0.3 – Rejected."
Echo's ink twitched.
The thing screamed.
No mouth. No air. Just a scream written in margin code.
Then it charged.
Ash drew first.
Curata followed.
Echo didn't move.
His ink reacted, reaching toward the creature, not to attack, but to resonate.
He felt it.
This was not a villain.
This was a failed story.
It had once tried to be a protagonist. Maybe a side character. Maybe a legend. But somewhere in the drafts, it had been cut, then forgotten, then rewritten into something else.
His ink latched onto a thread of it.
And something surged – a memory not his –
Running barefoot across an idea of a city.
Falling in love before her character sheet had even been submitted.
Begging not to be replaced by a more marketable arc.
Echo gasped.
The thing saw him.
And stopped.
It knew him.
"You're the one who brings us back."
Then it vanished.
Not destroyed.
Not slain.
Just… absorbed. Rewritten into memory.
Ash was pale. "That thing knew you."
Curata stared. "That thing should never have existed."
"I didn't summon it," Echo said.
"No," she replied. "You remembered it."
That night, they made camp.
Ash sat with his back to a fractured log that used to be a chapter divider.
Curata paced.
Echo stood alone, staring at his palm.
His ink whispered.
And for a moment, he saw something.
A version of himself.
Older. Crueler. Covered in myths that didn't belong to him. Standing atop a city made of erased characters, wearing their stories like armour.
A tyrant of stolen arcs.
He blinked.
The vision was gone.
But the fear remained.