Ansel woke up in the darkness. For a moment, he wasn't sure if he was still in the building or if he had simply lost his mind. His head throbbed with a dull, rhythmic pain, like something ancient was knocking against the inside of his skull. His chest ached too—the sensation of being suffocated was so real he thought he might still be trapped beneath something. Drowning in air.
Instinctively, his trembling hands reached out and touched the surface beneath him.
Cold. Rough. Stone.
He tried to sit up, but his limbs were sluggish, unresponsive. His body wasn't obeying him the way it should. Panic skittered across his skin. Something wasn't right.
As his fingers scraped against the ground, he managed to push himself into a sitting position. His breath came in short, panicked bursts. The air here was thick and metallic, stifling, as if it hadn't been breathed in centuries. The hum—the ever-present vibration of the hallway, that living pulse—was gone.
Only silence now. And that silence was heavier than sound.
"Where am I?" he whispered hoarsely, though the question felt hollow, absurd.
Because he wasn't just asking about his location.
He was asking about himself.
The floor beneath him was cracked and uneven, the scent of mildew and old blood lingering in the air. Dust swirled around him, disturbed by his movement, catching what little light there was and making it dance in slow spirals. His eyes adjusted to the gloom, and what he saw made bile rise in his throat.
A room. But not a room in the conventional sense. No door. No windows. No escape. The walls, if they could even be called that, weren't built—they had grown. They pulsed and stretched like lungs, covered in something that looked almost like skin. He could hear the heartbeat now. Faint, syncopated with his own.
Was it syncing to him?
The realization made him shudder. He wasn't alone here. The room was watching him. Breathing with him. Waiting.
He staggered to his feet, swaying. Every movement was a war against the heaviness in his limbs. He took one cautious step forward, eyes scanning his surroundings.
Then he saw it.
In the center of the room, a figure towered in silence.
At first glance, it resembled a statue. But the closer he got, the less certain he became. The thing wasn't stone. It wasn't even metal. It was flesh—sickly pale, stretched taut over a humanoid form. Its chest was bare, its eyes gaping voids. But those eyes, deep, black hollows, followed him.
His skin crawled.
It wasn't a statue.
It was alive.
Still, Ansel couldn't stop himself. A force beyond his will compelled him to reach out. His hand, shaking, touched its surface—and instantly, a current of electricity shot through his body. His vision blurred. The thing's eyes flickered.
And then—it spoke.
"You are lost."
The voice was like stone grating against metal, ancient and bitter.
"No," Ansel breathed, recoiling. "I'm not lost." I'm just trying to get out."
The statue tilted its head slightly. Studying him. Weighing him.
"The path to freedom lies within. But you are already part of it. You cannot escape."
Those words. He'd heard them before. In the hallway. In the mirror. Whispered in his dreams.
"No…" he whispered, but it was weak, half-believed.
The statue's mouth curled into a grotesque smile. It opened wider than any human mouth should, and from within came a sound—chorus, not of voices, but of memories. Faces flickered in the shadows. People Ansel didn't know, yet somehow recognized. They were reaching out to him. Whispering. Beckoning.
"You are already part of it. Your mind, your body. You cannot escape what you've become."
His thoughts twisted. Fractured. A fog clouded his memory, making it impossible to tell what was real. But one image emerged—sharp, undeniable.
A machine.
Not just any machine. The Rewrite Machine.
Not a myth. Not a hallucination. It was real. It sat in the depths of the building, buried in a room older than the structure itself. A machine built to erase stories. To unmake and remake them.
And Ansel had touched it.
That's when it began.
Not erasure. But rewriting.
The realization hit him like a wave. The hallucinations, the whispers, the changes in the building—they weren't haunting him.
They were editing him.
"You were written to be afraid," the statue crooned. "But fear is only a prologue."
"No…" Ansel backed away, stumbling. "I'm not part of this." I'm not…"
But he couldn't finish. Because something was changing inside him. His hands were beginning to distort, his fingertips fading in and out of clarity. He reached up to touch his face and felt nothing. Not absence. Not flesh. Just… data.
The shadows pressed in, taking shape. The air thickened, becoming tactile. Not air at all—words. Lines. Sentences. They wrapped around him, smothering him in prose and punctuation.
He screamed.
Somewhere deep within the building, a switch flipped.
Ansel's body convulsed, and the room went white. His mind was pulled through a thousand echoes at once. Time fractured. He saw other versions of himself—some dead, some trapped in loops, some still fighting.
And through all of them, the same figure loomed.
Not the statue.
Her.
The woman in the room. The shadow that had smiled. The one whose eyes had burned like holes in the narrative.
She stood at the edge of the memory now, waiting. Watching.
"You'll come back to me," her voice echoed. "They always do. Especially the rewritten ones."
The light vanished.
Ansel gasped awake on the floor of the hallway. The old one. The first one.
But something had changed.
The air didn't hum. It sang.
The doors were gone. The hallway was a single line stretching forever in both directions. No lights. No shadows. Just text, scrolling endlessly across the walls, pulsing with memory and command.
He looked down and saw his arm again.
It was no longer flesh. It was ink.
Not bleeding. Writing.
And then—a sound.
Soft. Mechanical.
Behind him.
The click of keys.
The hiss of a machine rebooting.
And the unmistakable voice of someone… typing.
Ansel turned, his pulse racing.
But what he saw was not a person.
It was the Rewrite Machine.
And someone was sitting in front of it.
Typing.
His story.
Word by word.
Letter by letter.
And as the words continued, he felt it all begin again —
Then everything stopped.
One final line blinked on the wall in front of him, pulsing in soft red light.
Ansel's fight against the building seems to be slipping through his fingers as he faces the horrifying truth of his existence within it. As the darkness begins to consume him,
Ansel's mind was a storm, a whirlwind of fear and confusion, and yet beneath the chaos, a cold, dark realization began to take root: he was no longer himself. The building—this thing, this living, breathing, suffocating nightmare—was not just a prison for his body. It was a prison for his very soul. The walls were its tendrils, reaching into him, reshaping who he was, who he had been, and who he was to become. Every corner of this place, every whisper, every shadow, was a part of him now. He could feel it sinking into his bones, his thoughts, his identity.