The Deep Layer was quiet. Too quiet.Lucien walked through its paper-white plains, hearing only the crunch of his own steps on something that wasn't ground but memory—thin, fragile, and faintly warm.
He'd expected silence to be comforting after everything that had burned and screamed behind him. Instead, it pressed against his chest like a held-back heartbeat.
Every so often the world flickered—an image sliding under reality like a page turning. A city he didn't know. A hospital corridor. A scent of rain. All gone in less than a breath.
Glitch, he told himself. Just residue of stories collapsing.But a colder part of him whispered, You've been here before.
He stopped. In the distance stood a figure—small, wrapped in a cloak of static. No face, no features, only a trembling outline.
Lucien tightened his grip on the pen-blade. "Show yourself."
The figure didn't move. Instead, its voice came from everywhere at once, distorted and low:
"Why do you walk where you already died?"
Lucien froze. "What did you say?"
The echo tilted its head. Its voice sharpened, repeating slower, crueler.
"Why do you walk… where you already died?"
For a heartbeat, Lucien saw something behind its outline—a reflection of himself lying in the middle of a street, blood pooling under neon light. Then the image vanished.
He staggered back. "That… wasn't me."
"No?" the echo asked. "Then whose hands carried her blood?"
The air cracked. A flash of red, a scream that wasn't from this world. Lucien's chest tightened, pain slicing through his ribs. His surroundings blurred, bending like melting ink.
He dropped to one knee. "Stop. I don't remember that. I don't—"
"Memory doesn't care about what you remember," the echo said, stepping closer. "It only cares about what you've erased."
Lucien looked up—and saw his own eyes staring back at him. Cold, empty, accusing.
His double smiled. "Murderer of the Light."
Then the figure dissolved into smoke, leaving only a whisper that coiled into his mind.
You can't rewrite what you killed.
He sat there for a long time, breathing hard. The world around him was normal again, the plains flat and gray. But the image lingered—Sera's blood, his hand, the streetlight flickering above.
He touched his forehead. His skin felt hot, almost burning.
"Not real," he said. "Not real."
But when he closed his eyes, the memory came again—clearer this time.A woman's voice, trembling: 'Lucien, please—don't—'Then the sound of glass breaking.
He jolted up. "Stop it!"
The plains rippled like disturbed water. His words rewrote the air, stabilizing it for a moment. Still, the tremor in his hands didn't fade.
Something was bleeding through the narrative, something older than this world.
He walked again, faster now, almost running. The plains gave way to corridors of unfinished text. Sentences hung mid-air, drifting like fog:
He didn't know what he had done.He forgot because remembering would destroy him.
Lucien slashed through the words, scattering them. But new lines appeared beneath:
Truth waits for page 30.
He froze. That wasn't his writing. Someone—or something—was narrating him.
"Evan," he whispered. "Are you doing this?"
No answer, only the faint sound of scratching quills somewhere in the dark.
He kept walking until the corridors ended at a door—an ordinary wooden door standing alone in the white void. A single word was carved into it:
REMEMBER.
Lucien reached for the handle, but his hand stopped an inch away.He didn't know why, but every instinct screamed don't open it yet.
Behind the door, he heard breathing. Slow. Familiar.
He stepped back. "Not yet," he said. "If I open you now, I won't make it to the end."
The door pulsed once—like a heartbeat—and went still.
Lucien turned away.For the first time since entering the Deep Layer, he felt something human: fear. Not of death, but of knowing.
As he walked back toward the faint glow of the story world ahead, the whisper followed him.
You can't rewrite what you killed.But you can finish what she started.
He didn't answer. He couldn't.The world around him blurred into ink and light again, carrying him upward toward the next chapter.