[-The Final Draft-]
Volume XV - [Away from chapter]
-LdrQll
Everything went silent—so silent that even the constant hum of my tinnitus was gone.
And then... voices.
Faint at first, but growing clearer. High-pitched, playful. The familiar cadence of children's laughter breaking through the black.
I opened my eyes.
I was standing in a corridor, swallowed by the press of bodies. The walls were bright, lined with scuffed lockers and peeling posters. A school.
Parents loitered beside their children, chatting idly. Some kids ran down the hall, shoes squeaking, their laughter ringing off the tiles. It was warm here—too warm after the void—but not in a way that comforted me.
Then I saw him.
My younger self.
He stood in the middle of the hallway, clutching a worn notebook so tightly the pages bent under his fingers. His hair hung over his eyes, a plaster patch stuck awkwardly to his cheek.
I followed his gaze.
Down the hall, my parents stood with my brother between them, each holding one of his hands. They were smiling. Together.
And I remembered.
This was the PTA meeting. The day I was locked in the bathroom stall, pounding on the door until my voice broke. I'd climbed over the cubicle wall, scraped my knees on the way down, and sprinted to the teacher's office—only to find they'd already gone.
I knelt in front of him now, watching the moment I had once lived. His face trembled, his lower lip caught between his teeth as he tried to keep the tears in.
It didn't work.
And I couldn't stop it.
He turned away, walking in the opposite direction, head bowed so low his hair shadowed his face.
I took a step to follow—
—and the world tore itself apart.
The corridor split into shreds, sheets of paper ripping free and whirling through the air. The children, the walls, the light itself—peeled away like pages torn from a book. One by one, the fragments dissolved into nothing, replaced by something new.
"Come on! Hurry up before the teachers see us!" a boy's voice rang out, sharp and breathless with laughter. A chair scraped against the floor as he wedged it under the storage room's knob. Footsteps pounded away, leaving the muffled echo of their amusement.
I drifted forward, my body slipping through the locked door like smoke.
And there he was again.
Me.
Sitting on the floor, scribbling into that same worn notebook—the one that had followed me through every year. The pages were wrinkled and wet, the letters running into black stains where tears had soaked through.
Fourth grade.
His fingers were wrapped in band-aids, his cheek blotched with a fresh patch. He sat curled up tight, knees drawn to his chest, the pen trembling in his hand. Every few seconds, his breath hitched, but he never stopped writing—as though the words on those pages were the only thing keeping him from falling apart completely.
I sat beside him, watching the pen scratch against the page.
That notebook... I knew it well. It was the first novel I ever wrote.
When I was young, my mother would buy books for my brother. He never wanted them—he preferred toys, or the glow of a gadget screen—so they gave him those instead. The books sat untouched.
I had to ask for them. Beg, even. Not because I was desperate to read, but because I wanted her attention.
She gave me the books, but her eyes stayed on my brother. My father's did, too.
At first, I read them because they were the only things she had given me. Most were harmless—thin, cheerful children's stories. But once, tucked between the bright covers, was something different. A novel. Slipped in by mistake.
I couldn't understand most of it then—philosophy knotted into fiction, sentences that felt like walls I couldn't climb. I tried anyway.
Years later, I read it again, and the meaning unlocked. I fell in love with it completely.
By second grade, I was trying to write my own. That first novel lived entirely in the notebook the boy beside me was clutching now.
His head was low, hair hiding his eyes, shoulders hunched in that same defeated curve I remembered.
He wasn't writing to tell a story.
He was writing because no one was listening.
The same reason I did.
The same reason I still do before the apocalypse began.
The memory split apart again, pages ripping into the dark. They curled like burning paper, edges glowing, until the scraps reassembled into something new.
"Give it back... come on."
A younger voice—thin, wavering, pleading.
"Then take it from me."
Another voice, older, dripping with mockery.
I turned toward the sound.
Isaac stood there. My brother. One hand clutching my notebook like a trophy, the other arm outstretched to block the boy in front of him.
"Please... just give it back," my younger self said, reaching for it with open desperation.
Isaac smirked, eyes flicking over the worn cover. "What is this, your diary?" His tone sharpened into a cruel sing-song. "Dear diary... today I played in the garden and chased butterflies like an idiot."
The words twisted like a blade, and before the boy could answer, Isaac shoved him. He hit the floor hard, the air punched from his lungs.
"Isaac... stop it!"
But Isaac's attention was already on the fireplace. The flames danced hungrily, reflecting in his eyes. He lowered the notebook toward the fire, pulling it back, lowering it again, teasing like a cat playing with its prey.
Then it slipped.
"NO!"
Isaac flinched at the shout—but not fast enough. The boy lunged, shoving him aside. The pages kissed the fire, and in a heartbeat, the flames leapt to life.
I remembered what I did that day. What he was about to do.
No hesitation. No thought of the pain. Just the need to save it—because if the notebook burned, the words would burn, and if the words burned, then so would the only proof I existed.
The boy's small hands plunged into the fire. Skin sizzled. The stench of burning flesh rose with the acrid smoke of paper. His fingers curled around the notebook, pulling it free even as the heat blistered them raw.
This time, I saw Isaac's face clearly—shock, almost fear—like he'd never believed I would hurt myself just to keep it.
The boy stumbled back, tears spilling freely, the notebook clutched to his chest. His breath broke into ragged gasps as he stomped the fire out with shaking feet.
The cover was warped, the pages blackened. His hands were an angry red, skin already peeling at the edges.
And still, he never let go.
Tears fell onto the charred cover, dark drops hissing softly where they struck the blackened edges. His breath trembled as he eased the notebook open.
Most of the pages were still there—words untouched, only their borders bitten by fire. Relief broke over him like a fragile wave, though the sting in his hands never faded.
He didn't look at Isaac. Not once.
Instead, he turned away, cradling the book as though the flames might still try to claim it. Each step was slow, careful—past the dim hallway, up the narrow stairs—until the shadows swallowed him whole.
Back to his room.
Or rather... the attic.
I didn't follow myself.
Instead, I stayed where Isaac had been sitting, frozen in his surprise.
The fire in the hearth roared without warning—hungry, violent—and the scene dissolved into black ash. The pages of the memory curled, shriveled, and were gone.
Darkness swallowed me whole.
I was floating again, adrift in the void, the fragments of my life circling like scraps of burnt paper.
Is this what they mean when they say, "your life flashes before your eyes"?
If so, mine was nothing but smoke—no joy to be found, because joy had never existed here.
"That was not the rest."
The voice startled me. It had no direction, no echo, as if it bloomed inside my skull.
"Shall I continue showing you those memories?"
I turned slowly, unsure why my pulse quickened when there was no heartbeat in this place. And then...
Far off in the black: a figure.
He floated as if the void belonged to him, draped in a long dark robe with the edges stitches in white. A hood shadowed his face, a crown hovered above his head.
And below...
My breath caught.
From beneath the robe, a tangle of tentacles writhed and slithered—not toward me, but toward the drifting fragments of my past. They coiled around the scorched scraps, examining them with a terrible patience, before letting them slip away again into the void.
"Who... who are you?" I asked.
At this point, I had already surrendered to whatever this was. Whether the Being in Dark was danger or salvation no longer mattered—there was nothing left in me worth saving.
"I am... who you think I am," he said.
I blinked.
In that half-second, the distance between us vanished—he was suddenly in front of me, close enough that I could see the faint shimmer of Blue threading through his hood.
"Death?" The word left my mouth before I could think.
I had always imagined Death draped in black, So I thought immdeiately... that he is death.
"You could say that," he replied, tentacles stirring lazily in the void around us, their movements hypnotic.
"You did die... didn't you?"
The question coiled in my mind like one of his tendrils, and I found myself nodding—slowly, almost reluctantly.
"You have surrendered yourself to death... for the reason to live has slipped beyond your grasp."
His hooded head tilted, and where a face should have been, I saw only a vast swirl of stars and endless cosmos.
"A life so... unbearable," he continued, "that death itself has become your only true escape. But before that..." The words lingered, heavy, before he spoke again. "Before everything that has happened, it was different. Before death became salvation... your escape from the world's hostility was to create other worlds."
The void around us pulsed faintly with his words.
"Stories... in which you felt happiness for the first time."
I could not answer.
"Writing was your sanctuary. Tell me—how did it suddenly change?" he asked, though the answer was painfully obvious. His voice was not demanding, but it left no room to hide.
"You gave up simply because the world changed as well," he said, almost echoing the thoughts I had buried. "And you told yourself it was useless... that words could not shape reality. How can I fight an apocalypse with a pen? How can I face a beast with nothing but words?"
Each phrase was a mirror shoved before me, forcing me to remember the times I had laid down the pen, the nights I chose silence instead of stories.
"You gave yourself a calling," the Being said at last, his tone shifting, "just as the deities once gave callings to humanity."
His crown pulsed with blinding light, and his tentacles stretched outward like roots piercing the void. Still, behind the Dark pulsating hood, his face remained hidden—nothing but galaxies, endless and unreachable.
"If I didn't fight, I would die..." My voice cracked as the words spilled out. "Yes, I gave up because it's true. I have no powers, no strength, no fire that bursts from my hands, no holy blessing. I was cast away..." My chest heaved, the words heavy, but as they left me I felt a hollow echo—like a reason I clung to, though deep down I knew it was shallow.
The Being in Black tilted his head again. "I thought you were... Undying. Like some otherworldly creature, lurking in the depths of the ocean. You gave yourself such a bold name... yet you are afraid of death?"
His words struck harder than I expected. It was as if he knew something no one else could.
"Isn't that right?" he pressed. "You call yourself UndyingJellyfish. A name that carries no end, no surrender. You die, yet you drift back to life again... over and over. So why would you fear death?"
My breath caught. My chest tightened. The void seemed to close in as he spoke the name I thought I had left behind—the pseudonym I once carried, the one I used when I was still an author... before the world collapsed, before the apocalypse erased everything.
"How... did—" I stammered, but the Being cut me off before the words could form.
"You left the worlds you created... the stories you breathed into being... just to preserve your own miserable life." His voice rang like judgment, heavy and final. Guilt gnawed at me, hollowing me out.
I lowered my gaze, staring at the trembling lines of my palm as though it held an answer I could no longer find.
"It is as if you abandoned a kitten in the middle of nowhere," he continued, unrelenting. "You abandoned them to survive... yet still met death regardless."
His words pressed on me, each syllable a new weight added to the crushing boulder on my back—until it felt as though he set an elephant atop it as well.
"Do you not remember?" His hood shifted, the cosmos within churning. "Your life was nothing before you became what you were. A life buried in shadow, forgotten even by those who should have loved you most. Sometimes not even your parents remembered you. The ones you reached for never reached back. Every obstacle towered impossibly over you. You suffered in a loneliness that no one else could see."
The void around me seemed to close tighter with each word.
"Tricked. Cast away. Treated as if you were nothing." His voice darkened, the cosmos within his hood flickering like dying stars.
"Everyone is the main character of their own story... and you..." He leaned closer, the abyss within him threatening to swallow me whole. "...you are nothing but a nobody."
"Ask for their forgiveness... the worlds you abandoned, the stories you cast aside... the characters you threw away. Beg them for mercy. And return... return to what you truly are."
His words shattered me. I collapsed into the void. Tears spilled freely, burning my cheeks as though each one carried the weight of a name I had forgotten.
"The true nature of identity," he continued, his voice reverberating like the echo of eternity itself, "is not what fate has carved into you... but what you have chosen to shape yourself into."
"Although... to tell you the truth... you are not bound by fate, Ivan," the Being said, his voice slow, each word unraveling into the void like an ancient truth. "Rather... you are someone who has been overlapped by it."
"In other words... you have been overshadowed."
My head lifted weakly, tears dripping from my chin. "What... what do you mean by that?" I asked, voice breaking.
"The world is just a story, Ivan," he said, the stars within his hooded face flickering like pages being turned. "A story that the characters call fate."
"Forget your life that you have experienced... forget the people that have only caused you pain and suffering... for you are infinitely farther than them, far and beyond"
"you are not a character of that story... you were never was...."
I stared upon the Being in Black. The weight of realization pressed down so heavily I thought it would crush me into dust.
But as my mind began to comprehend his words, the burden loosened. The chains that gripped my heart slackened, one by one, and I felt pieces of myself falter—falling away like shards being stripped from a dying star.
Though uncertainty still clung to me, I began to accept it... the truth that all my despair, all my suffering, every struggle I once thought unbearable—were nothing. That my life, as it was, had carried no meaning at all.
The Being's voice reverberated through the endless dark, shaking me to my core.
"Take off your humanity... and let the singularity be one with you."
I saw a light behind my eyes. For a heartbeat, it spread until it consumed everything—my vision warped, dissolved, drowned in endless white.
For the first time, I felt warmth. The coldness of my loneliness, the frost that had clung to me for years, melted away.
But it didn't last. The white receded, and the void returned.
The Being's voice resonated through me.
"Ivan... I put you there not because I wished you to live within the story as well. Your suffering was brought to you unknowingly—for you are the one who carved your own destiny. You are a fragment of me... a fragment I placed within the tale, to rewrite the whole plot should corruption spread."
The realization struck deep. If I carved my own destiny, then everything that had happened... had happened because of me.
He was right. Fate had turned its back against me—utterly, literally.
"And right now... the very thing I am afraid of has come," he said, his voice deep enough to rattle the emptiness.
"An unknown cosmic entity has broken the laws of cosmicity... and interfered with the story."
The void trembled faintly, as if his words alone bent the fabric of the place.
"Because of this interference, the formulas I have written collapsed. The corruption spread. Characters suffer in unending pain—they twist, they break, they bleed with ink until they are no longer themselves."
His tentacles writhed slowly, like quills dipped in shadowed pools.
"I am afraid that if this continues... the whole story will crumble into unfated ruin. That is why you must rewrite it, Ivan. For you are the only fragment I placed within the tale."
He raised a hand, and the stars that were not stars dimmed.
"And so I tell you this... I..The Elder Quill—entrust the fate of humanity... to you. Their ending is yours to write. Whether they collapse into demise... or celebrate in victory. The pen rests in your hands."
The void rang with his voice, louder than thunder, deeper than silence.
I staggered, overwhelmed. Yet for the first time, I understood him. Not as an enemy, not as a god, but as something that had always been part of me.
Slowly, his hand rose above me, looming until it touched my head.
My vision blurred and then—flashed.
In the next heartbeat, I saw them. Tiny, trembling spectacles of life, smaller than dust—microorganisms drifting in unseen currents. Then vast plants rising, swallowing the horizon. Towering insects, wings like stained glass thundering across the sky.
Then came the giants. Dinosaurs, their thunderous steps shaking the ground, until fire from the heavens carved their end.
The vision shifted. Cavemen struck sparks in the dark, their primal cries echoing across time. Then—civilization. Stone turned to bronze, bronze to iron, empires rising and falling like waves. Wars bled across the earth, plagues swept whole nations, yet still humanity endured.
Faces. Countless faces. Faces I never knew—laughing, weeping, screaming, dying, being born. The breath of a billion souls passing through me in an instant.
And then, another flash.
The present twisted into the monstrous. I saw creatures hunting in ruined cities, clawing through concrete and flesh. I saw the towers collapse, fire consuming, the world turning to ash and shadow. Humanity broken. An apocalypse stretching its hand across every corner of the earth.
I saw it all.
All of it—the past, the present, the future. Spiraling, colliding, crashing into me like a storm with no end.
From behind the storm of warping visions, his voice cleaved through the chaos—louder than thunder, sharper than the ringing of stars, yet clear as if whispered at my ear.
"I hereby... bestow upon you... the Authorship of Fate."
"A title written before time, and yet born anew within you."
"I name it... The World of Darkened Souls."
"To you I give the Pen—the instrument of creation, the blade of Fate. With it, you shall carve reality itself."
"You are the inexorable force that even despair cannot chain. Against all of humankind you will stand, not as their prey, nor as their savior, but as their Author."
"None shall halt your hand. None shall silence your will."
"No power, no diety, no fate shall oppose you... save for yourself."
"For you are now... the Author."
His words did not merely echo—they were inscribed across my very being, etched into the marrow of my soul, like commandments written in fire and shadow.
Suddenly... my vision trembled, quaked as though the very fabric of my sight was being torn apart... and then it grew dark.
Deafeningly dark.
The thunder of his voice vanished. The roar of creation itself was smothered. All that remained was silence—silence so complete that even the echo of my breath felt stolen away.
My eyes were open... yet there was nothing. Not void, not emptiness—something deeper. A darkness that devoured even the thought of light.
I reached out in my mind for his voice, but it was gone. The Elder Quill, the visions, the spiral of fate—all snuffed out in a single breath.
Until...