Tirian left the cathedral of screaming parchment with a wound that didn't bleed.
The thread of that thing's voice still wrapped around his bones. Not spoken, not remembered — embedded. As if the words had been written in the marrow. He didn't know what they meant, but they shaped how he walked. Slower. Straighter. Like someone being watched.
The city behind him did not disappear.
It folded.
Not downward, not away — inward. As if rejecting its own existence. Only ash remained. And Tirian.
And the page that followed him.
It flapped behind him without wind, orbiting his steps like a lost pet. Blank, but breathing. Sometimes, he turned to look at it, and he swore he saw shapes in the fibers — eyes, perhaps. Teeth. Prayers in reverse.
He did not dare touch it.
Not yet.
Instead, he moved forward, into the wastes beyond. The sky overhead trembled. At first glance, it was night. But not truly. Stars blinked in patterns that didn't match memory or science — each one a sentence trying to escape its punctuation.
The mountains ahead were not mountains.
They were graves.
Colossal tombs carved for giants long forgotten — beasts that had never walked this world, yet died here. One had antlers made of clock hands. Another had wings of rusted mirrors. Their bones sang in the windless air.
And between them, something stirred.
It was not alive.
But it was not dead.
A hunched creature emerged from the dust — skin like shattered ink, limbs stitched together with thorns and wires. Its face was a mask of glass, cracked down the middle. Inside, smoke swirled.
The page behind Tirian screamed.
The creature bowed.
"Not yet," it rasped, voice like broken bells. "Not for me. Not for now."
Tirian raised the blade.
The creature recoiled — not in fear, but reverence.
"You walk with the Quill-Wound," it said. "You've been marked by the Librarian."
Tirian didn't answer.
"You are not a god," the thing hissed, almost disappointed. "But you are becoming… a correction."
It reached into its own chest and pulled out a sliver of black glass — a shard of its own mask. "Offer this when the Archivists forget you," it whispered. "They will remember pain."
Tirian took it.
The creature collapsed into script. Literal script — its body unraveling into letters and paragraphs, vanishing into the dust.
Only one sentence remained, etched into the stone where it died:
"To write is to rewrite the blade."
Tirian kept walking.
The world bent as he did.
Reality began to stutter. One moment, he was on solid ground. The next, he stood inside a corridor made of broken bookshelves, floating midair. Then he walked through a hallway of mirrors reflecting only versions of Elías — twisted, crowned, devoured, screaming.
One wore the same mark Tirian now bore.
Another held nothing but the pen.
A third… was bound to a throne made of wings and chains.
Tirian passed through.
The corridor ended with a door.
Not a normal one.
It was made of regret — memories carved into bones, shaped like a doorway. Tirian didn't knock.
He stepped through.
And he saw him.
Elías.
Or perhaps a version of him.
The boy sat on a throne of ink, his hands trembling, his eyes hollow. He was not asleep. He was not awake. He was being read.
Behind him, an ocean of pages turned themselves, each wave crashing in silence. The air shimmered with voices that didn't belong. And Tirian knew, without question:
This was the center of something.
The font of authorship.
And Elías… was its key.
Tirian stepped forward.
"Elías," he whispered.
The boy didn't move.
But something else did.
The page that followed Tirian for so long suddenly flew forward — and pressed itself against Elías's chest.
And the throne screamed.
The ocean folded in. The mirrors above cracked. The book behind the throne slammed shut, though no hand touched it.
Elías opened his eyes.
They were not his own.
They were pages.
And they blinked.
---
Question for the reader: If your memories could be edited — would you erase your pain, even if it meant losing the part of you that survived it?