Death in the Present
---
The sky was on fire.
Not the kind of fire you see in a hearth, not the warm crackle that comes with comfort — this was the color of endings. Clouds boiled red and black, swallowing the sun until the light itself seemed to scream.
The city around me was breaking apart.
Stone towers crumbled like children's toys, streets split open with a sound like bones snapping, and the air was thick with the taste of ash. People ran past me in a blur — faces I knew, faces I didn't — all of them distorted by fear.
"Kael!"
I turned. Through the chaos, a boy in a soot-stained cloak was waving at me, his mouth moving, his eyes wide — but before I could reach him, the ground between us folded in on itself like a piece of paper being crushed by an unseen hand. He was gone.
The screams didn't stop.
I staggered forward, my legs moving before my mind could decide on a destination. My fingers brushed the hilt of the short sword at my hip — the only thing I had left after the raid began — but I already knew it wouldn't be enough. The enemy wasn't human.
I saw them.
Shadows that walked like men, their bodies nothing but silhouettes with no faces, no edges — as if they'd been cut out from reality itself. They drifted through the fire like smoke, each one carrying an impossible weight in their presence. The sight of them made my teeth ache, my head throb.
One of them turned toward me.
It didn't run. It didn't even walk fast. It just… moved, and the world between us seemed to shorten. The flames dimmed around it, as though even light refused to touch it.
When it spoke, its voice wasn't sound. It was memory.
"You don't belong here."
I froze. "What…?"
The shadow tilted its head. The movement was slow, deliberate — almost curious. "Your name was never meant to be written in this history."
My grip tightened on the sword. "I don't know what you're talking about, but you're the one who—"
The shadow was in front of me before I could finish. Cold spread through my chest.
I looked down.
A hand made of ink and night pierced straight through my ribs, black tendrils curling outward into the air. My breath caught, but I couldn't feel pain — just a strange, pulling sensation, like the world was trying to drag me backward.
The shadow leaned close. Its voice filled my skull.
"We've done this before, Kael. And I will kill you again, in every history that exists."
My vision blurred. The fire faded to grey. My knees buckled, and I fell. The cobblestones felt far away, my body too heavy to catch.
Everything should have gone dark.
But instead… the world shifted.
The ground beneath me rippled like water, and the city vanished — replaced by the sharp scent of salt, the sound of waves, and the creak of wooden docks.
I was lying on a pier. The sky above was blue. The air was warm. There were no screams, no fire, no shadows.
And no wound in my chest.
I sat up slowly, my heart pounding, my hand gripping the place where I should've been bleeding out. My shirt was whole. My sword was gone.
A gull cried somewhere overhead.
People moved along the docks, laughing, hauling nets, arguing over the price of fish. No one looked at me. No one seemed to notice that I had just… appeared.
But I remembered.
I remembered the fire. The collapsing city. The shadow's voice. And the moment its hand tore through my chest.
I remembered dying.
And now… I was here.
The Second Reality
---
The waves rolled lazily against the pier, sunlight scattering in fragments across their surface. Everything here was calm — too calm.
The smell of charred stone and ash still clung to my memory, but here the air was salt and brine, the sort of scent that belonged to people who'd never seen fire destroy their homes.
I got to my feet slowly, my boots scraping against damp planks.
"What the hell…" I muttered, turning in a slow circle.
The pier stretched out to a lively harbor. Fishing boats bobbed in their berths, their sails drying under the warm sun. Crates of shellfish and wriggling silver fish lined the waterfront, and a cluster of children darted between barrels, laughing. A few older fishermen glanced my way, but their gazes slid past me without recognition.
No one screamed my name. No one was dying.
The last thing I remembered was a blade of darkness through my chest. Now I stood in a place that felt… whole.
I moved toward the edge of the pier, peering into the water. My reflection stared back: brown hair tangled with soot, face pale and drawn, eyes still carrying the weight of the burning city.
At least… it looked like me.
But the clothes were different. No torn leather armor, no sword. Just a plain linen tunic and trousers, the sort you'd wear if you'd spent your life gutting fish instead of fighting wars.
A splash of black caught my eye.
It was on my hand — the back of it. An inky blotch, the color of night, writhing faintly like it was alive. I tried rubbing it off, but my skin only burned in response.
"What are you?" I whispered.
"It's best not to touch it."
The voice came from behind me.
I spun around.
She stood at the far end of the dock, a young woman in a weathered coat and sea boots, her hair dark as wet sand. Her gaze was steady, her hands buried in her pockets. She didn't smile, didn't move closer — just looked at me like she already knew exactly what I was.
"Who—" I began.
"You shouldn't be here." She spoke with the calm of someone delivering bad news they'd given a hundred times before. "Not in this place. Not in this… version."
My stomach turned. "Version?"
"You were erased, Kael. But the ink doesn't let go so easily." She nodded toward my hand. "That's your proof."
My mouth went dry. "Erased… by who?"
Her eyes flicked toward the horizon, where the sea blurred into the sky. "You'll know soon enough."
She turned to walk away.
"Wait!" I stepped after her, the dock creaking under my weight. "You can't just—"
She glanced back over her shoulder. "Don't follow me. Not yet."
And just like that, she vanished.
Not into an alley, not behind a building — she simply wasn't there anymore. One heartbeat she was on the dock, the next she was gone, like she'd been cut out of the scene entirely.
I stood there for a long moment, the shouts of fishermen and the calls of gulls pressing in around me.
Erased.
Version.
The words looped in my head, each one heavier than the last.
The shadow in the burning city had said something similar — that my name wasn't meant to be in this history. That we'd done this before.
Which meant…
This wasn't a dream.
Something had happened. Something impossible. And now I was stuck in a world where no one remembered the one I'd lived in before.
I clenched my hand, the ink throbbing faintly against my skin.
If this was some kind of trick… I'd find the truth.
Even if it meant tearing through every version of the world until I did.
The Stranger at the Dock
---
The gulls kept circling above me, their cries sharp against the steady rhythm of the waves.
For a moment, I just stood there, staring at the empty spot where the woman had been.
She'd known my name.
She'd known about the ink.
And she'd disappeared like the shadow in the burning city — without warning, without a trace.
My first instinct was to chase her, but… where? The pier was open on all sides. There was no alley to vanish into, no hidden hatch in the planks. She was simply gone.
The thought made the hairs on my arms stand up.
"Kael!"
I jerked around. A fisherman was waving from further down the dock, a weathered man with a net slung over his shoulder. His face was tan from the sun, but there was something oddly… hollow in his expression, like he was going through the motions of smiling.
"You're late," he called, as if I'd kept him waiting.
"Late for what?" I asked, before I could stop myself.
The man chuckled like I'd made a joke. "Work, of course! Tide won't wait for us." He turned, gesturing for me to follow, and started walking toward a cluster of boats tied together at the far end of the harbor.
I didn't move. My gut screamed that something was off.
And then I noticed it — the faint ripple in the air around him, like heat rising from stone on a summer day. Except it wasn't hot. The breeze was cool.
I looked harder. His shadow on the pier wasn't right. The lines didn't match his movements — it twitched, shivered, like it was trying to break free from his feet.
My mouth went dry.
The burning city came rushing back in pieces: the shadow men, the way the world had bent around them.
"Kael," the fisherman said again, but his voice had changed. No warmth now. Just that same cold, hollow echo the shadow's voice had carried.
My instincts screamed run.
I stepped back. "You're not—"
His head tilted in the exact same slow, deliberate way the shadow in the city had. "You don't belong here."
The words hit me like ice water.
Before I could draw breath, the air behind me shifted. My boots slid against the pier as the boards warped under me, bending toward the fisherman like they wanted to hand me over.
I turned to bolt—
—and slammed straight into someone's chest.
Strong hands grabbed my shoulders, yanking me backward. "Move!"
It was the woman from before — the one in the weathered coat. She shoved me toward the open water just as the fisherman lunged, his body distorting, bones twisting under skin until his form melted into something formless and black.
A shadow man.
The same kind that had killed me.
The woman didn't hesitate. She pulled a knife from her coat — its blade dripping with black ink that seemed to devour the light — and slashed it through the air.
The shadow hissed. Not in sound — in memory. My ears rang with the echo of my own death as the thing staggered back, its form flickering.
She grabbed my arm. "Run. Now!"
We sprinted down the pier. My lungs burned, my heart hammering against my ribs. Behind us, the shadow surged forward again, its movements stretching reality in ways that made my vision swim.
"Where are we going?" I shouted.
"Somewhere it can't follow."
"Where's that?"
"The Archive."
I almost tripped. "The what?"
She didn't answer.
The boards beneath our feet groaned. The shadow was closing in — not running, but simply shortening the space between us with each flicker of movement.
"Jump!" the woman yelled.
Before I could argue, she yanked me over the side of the pier and into the freezing water below.
The harbor swallowed us whole.
The First Archive Appears
---
The water was a shock — cold enough to rip the air from my lungs.
I thrashed instinctively, but the woman's grip on my arm was iron.
"Don't fight it!" she shouted over the muffled roar in my ears.
The harbor above blurred into a ripple of light as we sank. My chest burned, but she didn't slow. Her coat drifted around her like a shadow, and with her free hand she pulled something from a pocket — a coin, glinting gold.
She pressed it against the water below us.
The sea parted.
No, not parted — split. The water peeled away in perfect walls on either side, revealing a narrow, spiraling stairway of dark stone descending into the depths. The steps were dry. The air smelled faintly of parchment and dust.
I stared. My mind refused to process it. "What the—"
"Move." She shoved me forward onto the steps.
The moment my foot hit the stone, the sound of the harbor vanished. No gulls, no water, no shouting fishermen — just silence so deep it pressed against my eardrums.
The stairwell wound downward in impossible loops, torches burning in sconces though I couldn't feel their heat. The walls were carved with countless tiny etchings — words so small I couldn't read them without leaning close. But every time I tried, the letters shifted away, curling into new shapes.
"What is this place?" I asked, my voice barely above a whisper.
"The First Archive," she said. "The only place where every history that ever was — or will be — is kept."
Her words sent a chill through me.
We walked. The stairs went on far longer than they should have, spiraling deeper until I felt like we'd passed below the very ocean floor. My legs ached, but I didn't dare stop.
At last, the stairs ended at a massive wooden door bound in black iron. The hinges looked older than the city I'd died in. Carved into the wood were thousands of names, each one scratched over and rewritten in a different hand.
The woman pushed it open.
The air that greeted us smelled of dust, old ink, and something else — something like ozone before a storm.
I stepped inside… and my breath caught.
It was a library.
But it was impossible.
Rows of shelves stretched away into infinity in every direction. Some climbed so high they disappeared into the shadows above; others vanished downward into pits that seemed to have no bottom. Ladders leaned against them, unmoving despite the absence of walls to anchor them. The light was strange — not from torches, but from the books themselves, their spines glowing faintly with colors I'd never seen before.
I turned in a slow circle. "This… this isn't real."
"It's real enough," she said. "And it's the only place you're safe from the ones hunting you."
Her gaze fell to my hand. The black ink mark was spreading — now curling up my wrist in thin, branching lines.
"What's happening to me?" I asked, my voice cracking despite myself.
"You were erased. But something — or someone — wrote you back in. That stain is the price. If it reaches your heart, you'll be gone for good."
My stomach turned. "Gone where?"
"Nowhere. As if you'd never existed."
She started walking, weaving between shelves with the certainty of someone who'd been here many times before. I followed, my boots thudding softly against the ancient floorboards.
We stopped at a desk in the center of an open space. A single book sat on it, bound in pale leather that seemed almost alive.
"This," she said, resting her hand on the cover, "is your record."
The moment she said it, I knew she was telling the truth. I didn't know how — I just… felt it.
She opened it.
My life spilled across the pages.
Memories in ink.
Birth.
Childhood.
Training with the militia.
The day the city burned.
And at the end — written in a sharp, black script that was not mine — was my death.
I stared at it, my hands trembling. "That's exactly how it happened."
"Good. Then you know what it means when I tell you this…"
She placed a quill beside the book.
"…if you change even a single word here, the world outside will change with it."
The Rewrite
---
The quill lay on the desk like it was waiting for me.
Its feather was white at the base but black at the tip, as though it had been dipped in endless night.
I stared at it, my stomach knotted.
"This is insane," I muttered.
The woman didn't blink. "Insanity is pretending you still live in the world you died in. You've been erased, Kael. This is the only way to keep yourself here."
I looked down at the open page.
There it was — the moment the shadow's hand pierced my chest. The script was sharp and clean, the letters flowing like water:
> On the eve of the Third Siege, Kael Veyran fell to the blade of the faceless one. His body dissolved into nothing, and no trace remained in any world.
The words were final. Absolute.
Reading them felt like pressing my hand to my own tombstone.
"You said… if I change something, the world changes with it."
"Yes. But it won't be neat. The larger the change, the more reality will fight to resist it. The more the ink will spread." She nodded at my arm — the stain had already crept past my elbow. "Change too much, and you'll tear yourself apart."
My fingers hovered over the quill. "And if I change nothing?"
"Then you fade completely. The stain finishes its work. You disappear, and no one will remember you ever existed."
I swallowed hard.
Every instinct told me this was wrong. That messing with whatever this was would only make things worse. But doing nothing meant letting that shadow win — and letting the burning city vanish like it had never been.
I thought of the boy calling my name before the ground swallowed him.
I thought of the faces I'd never see again.
And then I picked up the quill.
It was heavier than I expected, the metal tip cold as ice. When I touched it to the page, the letters bled and squirmed, as though they were alive and trying to escape.
The woman didn't stop me. She only stepped back, watching.
I drew a deep breath… and changed one line.
> On the eve of the Third Siege, Kael Veyran survived the blade of the faceless one.
The ink from the quill spread into the sentence like veins through marble, overwriting the old words until they were gone. The moment the last letter settled, the page shuddered — and so did the world around me.
The desk trembled. The shelves groaned. The torches along the walls flared with black light.
Then the floor tilted beneath me.
I stumbled back, my vision tearing open like a page being ripped in half. For a heartbeat, I saw two worlds — one of fire and ash, one of sunlight and harbor waves — colliding in a jagged blur. The sound was deafening, a chorus of voices speaking a thousand different versions of the same moment.
I hit the ground hard.
When I opened my eyes…
I was lying in the middle of a rain-soaked street.
The air was thick with the smell of wet stone and smoke. Buildings loomed around me, some familiar, some entirely alien — like a city stitched together from mismatched pieces. People hurried past without looking at me, their clothes and faces shifting subtly with every blink, as if they couldn't decide who they were.
The ink on my arm was burning now.
I scrambled to my feet, heart pounding.
"What… happened?" I whispered.
The woman appeared beside me like she'd been there the whole time. "You rewrote your death. You're alive — in this version. But reality didn't like the change."
I turned in a slow circle, taking in the mismatched city, the flickering faces, the way the rain seemed to fall both upward and down at once. "You mean… this is because of me?"
"This," she said grimly, "is the price."