A sharp gasp tore through Klein Moretti's throat as he lurched upright, hands trembling against the cold floor. His vision swam, the edges of his sight pulsing with a strange, shifting light. The world around him was unstable, walls bending in ways that defied logic, ink-black veins running across the surfaces like a manuscript being rewritten in real-time.
Where was he?
The last thing he remembered was the unraveling—the loops, the ink that refused to dry, the whispers of something rewriting the world. He had been trapped within a story, one that refused to be finished.
And then…
Yeaia.
The name surfaced in his mind like a ghost, distant yet familiar. Someone had been missing. A presence that should have been there, but had instead been erased, forgotten, or lost.
He forced himself to his feet, the air around him thick with distortion. The Archive of the Unwritten loomed around him, its endless rows of bookshelves stretching into the abyss, but something was wrong. The books were shifting, flickering between existence and nothingness, their titles blurring, their ink running like tears down a forgotten page.
"What is real?"
His voice felt foreign, as if spoken by someone else. He reached for his pocket watch, for the familiar weight of something concrete, but it wasn't there. Instead, his fingers brushed against something cold—something that pulsed with an uneasy rhythm.
A book.
No, not a book. A fragment. Torn pages bound together by something unseen, something unfinished. Its cover was blank, its title absent. But as Klein's fingers traced its spine, a whisper curled through the air.
"The Dream That Waits."
He inhaled sharply. That name—he knew that name.
It had been spoken before. Written before. But when? And by whom?
A sound behind him. A shuffle. A presence.
Klein turned swiftly, his mismatched eyes locking onto the figure standing at the far end of the corridor.
Yeaia Nolas.
Or at least, something that resembled them.
Their form flickered, shifting between states of being. Black and white hair streaked with faint red, mismatched eyes burning like dying embers. Their clothes rippled, layers shifting unpredictably between elegant robes and disheveled fabric. Their body—half-there, half-not, flickering in and out like an echo of something that had once existed.
Klein's grip on the fragment tightened.
"Yeaia?"
They blinked slowly, their expression unreadable. Then, as if testing the weight of their own voice, they spoke.
"That's… my name, isn't it?"
Something inside Klein twisted. He could see it—the hesitation, the uncertainty, the deep and gnawing doubt buried beneath their mismatched gaze. It was more than confusion. It was as if they had been erased and rewritten, only fragments of themselves remaining.
"Do you not remember?" Klein asked cautiously.
Yeaia tilted their head, a ghost of a smile flickering at the edge of their lips, but it didn't reach their eyes.
"I remember… a dream. A voice asking me if I wanted to wake up, or fade away."
Their gaze drifted to the fragment in Klein's hands.
"I think… I wasn't meant to be here. Or maybe, I was never meant to exist at all."
Klein took a slow breath. The Archive trembled around them, the bookshelves groaning as if weighed down by something immense. He didn't know what was happening, not fully—but he knew this much:
Something had tried to rewrite Yeaia.
Something had tried to erase them.
But they were still here.
And that meant there was still a chance to uncover the truth.
"We need to get out of here," Klein said, voice steady. "Before whatever is doing this decides to try again."
Yeaia regarded him for a long moment before nodding.
"Alright," they said, their form flickering slightly. "Let's wake up."
As Klein reached for them, as the world around them shuddered, as the books began to collapse into nothingness—
The dream began to break.
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End of Chapter 79
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