Word Count: ~1000
The door closed behind him with a whisper, not a sound.
It didn't latch. It didn't creak. It simply ceased to be.
Elias stood in nothing. Not blackness—absence. As though the rules of color, form, and thought had been gently erased by a hand far older than time. The floor beneath his feet felt real but unformed, like walking on compressed fog.
He looked down. There was no shadow.
Not even his own.
The journal in his hands had grown warm, its ink still writhing like something alive. It bled symbols onto his fingertips—runes not written in any human language. They glowed briefly, then sank into his skin like whispers being absorbed by bone.
A low hum began.
At first, it was so faint it might have been the sound of his own heartbeat. But it grew—warped—until it was something vast, orchestral, and wrong. Like a choir trying to remember a song that had been erased from existence.
Then the mist parted.
And Elias saw them.
Books.
Hundreds of them. Thousands. Floating in the void, suspended by unseen threads, pages flipping slowly through time that didn't exist. Some were bound in bark, others in glass. Some breathed. Some wept ink. One had a cover made of stitched-together names—each one half-erased.
They hovered like constellations in a forgotten sky.
And between them, figures.
Authors.
Or what remained of them.
Shrouded in ink-stained robes, some with faces concealed behind parchment masks, others eyeless and stitched at the mouth. Each one held a quill made of bone, and each sat before a single, ever-fading book. They wrote—and the words vanished the moment they formed.
Elias stepped forward.
The ground shifted beneath him like rippling water. As he moved, the floating tomes trembled—some snapping shut in protest, others opening wide as if inhaling the scent of his thoughts.
He felt watched. Not by one thing, but by many. By the library itself.
"Where am I?" he whispered, though the words came out wrong—flattened, muffled, like someone had pressed a finger to the lips of reality.
A voice answered.
Not in sound, but in concept.
> "You are within the Bleed."
The voice was old. Older than the ink in his blood.
> "A space between edits. The margin of all tales. Where every unwritten fate and forgotten ending comes to rest."
From the swirling fog emerged a figure—taller than the others, cloaked in cascading sheets of ink-slick pages. Its face was a shattered mirror reflecting a hundred expressions, none his own.
It bowed.
"You are not meant to be here, Elias Vale."
"How do you know my name?"
> "Because you have been written before. And written again. And erased, and remembered, and struck from the ledger."
The being reached out, touching the journal in Elias's hand. The cover peeled back of its own accord, pages fluttering rapidly to one that pulsed with fresh, wet ink.
It read:
> Chapter 5 – Where Stories Are Unmade
Word Count: 472… 473… 474…
Elias stared in horror. "It's writing what I'm doing."
> "No." The mirrored figure tilted its head. "It is writing what you've already done."
"But that's not possible. I haven't—"
> "Time does not flow here. It pools. It rewinds. It edits."
One of the faceless Authors turned toward them. It held a cracked quill and pointed toward Elias's chest. There, beneath the skin, something moved.
Lines of ink traced across his ribs like tattooed roots, spreading in rhythm with each breath.
The being continued:
> "You carry a fragment of the Codex."
Elias's heart thudded.
"The Codex? The Archivist said it was lost…"
> "Not lost. Buried. Fragmented. Hidden in characters, stories, and failed narratives. You are one of its vessels. One of its… revisions."
Elias stumbled back. "I'm not a story. I'm real."
> "So said every protagonist before deletion."
The Books around them began to flutter wildly now, reacting to his panic. One shrieked—a sound like tearing cloth and sobbing memories.
The air vibrated. Something was coming.
The ink-cloaked figure reached toward Elias.
> "You must leave, before the Editor finds you."
"The who?"
The void shuddered.
From far beyond the floating tomes, a sharp sound pierced the realm. A single tap. Like a pen against glass.
Then again.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
The figure pulled Elias close.
> "The Editor erases anomalies. Fixes plot holes. You are a contradiction, Elias. You should not be here yet. Not until Chapter Nine."
"Then why am I here now?"
> "Because someone tampered with your narrative."
The fog split like torn silk. A being stepped through.
Tall. Stark. Dressed in a suit made from perfectly aligned pages. Its face was blank. Its hands were red ink and scissors.
It saw Elias.
And began to cut.
Reality screamed.
The mirror-faced guide flung its pages around Elias like a cocoon. "Go! Remember nothing—only that the story has teeth!"
A tear ripped open the space behind him, and Elias fell through it—
Screaming.
---
He awoke on the cobblestones outside the Atrament Library.
Gasping. Ink staining his palms. The journal beside him, silent once more.
Above him, the gaslamps flickered.
And far away, from somewhere deep within Nocthaven's mist, came the sound of a quill scratching… and a page being turned.