The skies above Graveton changed color at dawn.
Not red.
Not gold.
But black-ink blue, laced with veins of glowing script that moved like clouds — each swirl a word, each flicker a sentence. It was no longer weather. It was memory bleeding into the present.
Jayden stood at the edge of the city's new wall, which wasn't made of stone… but of story.
Every brick carried a name.
A rewritten life.
A second chance.
But far beyond the wall — past the forests, over the silver hills, beneath the broken moons — a new power stirred.
They called themselves:
> "The Proofkeepers."
And they had come to reclaim the world… by deleting everything Jayden had changed.
---
Their Arrival
It started as static in the sky. Then silence. Then a voice:
> "The error must be corrected."
People froze in the streets. Children cried. Elders clutched at their heads.
Across Graveton, books began to scream.
Stories warped. Words bled.
Whole pages in memory vanished — as if lives had been unwritten.
Jayden raced toward the Council Tower with Seraya and Elira. The quill-mark on his arm burned hot.
"It's them," Elira said. "The ones who hate the blank page. They believe only one version of the world is true — theirs."
---
The First Strike
By noon, two rewritten cities were gone.
One blinked out mid-meal — a place Jayden had saved from blood taxes.
Another collapsed into mist — the village where Seraya had freed the dream-bonded Hollowborn.
Gone.
No rubble.
No survivors.
Just empty pages.
> The Proofkeepers left no bodies.
Only footnotes.
Jayden stood in horror as wind scattered torn paragraphs across the fields like ash.
"We have to fight back," Seraya said.
"With swords?" Jayden snapped. "They erase with a sentence."
Elira raised her hand.
"No," she whispered. "We fight them with story."
---
The Hidden Library
There was one place that might protect their rewritten truths:
The Library of Variants — an ancient, time-locked archive hidden in the bones of the world, where rejected versions of history are stored.
Seraya led the way.
Elira opened the gates.
Jayden walked in last — and the walls bowed slightly, recognizing his mark.
The inside was endless.
Thousands of floating tomes drifted past, each one sealed in spectral glass.
Jayden's gaze caught a red-bound book.
> "JAYDEN, Version 14 — Tyrant Ending."
He almost touched it.
Seraya stopped him. "Not all stories need reopening."
---
Meeting the Librarian
In the heart of the archive stood a man with ink for veins and no face — just an open page where his head should be.
He bowed low.
> "Welcome, Scribe of the Sixth."
Jayden: "Are you the Librarian?"
"No," the voice echoed from the walls. "I am the Library. He is just the bookmark."
Elira stepped forward. "We need protection. The Proofkeepers are deleting the rewrites."
"Then anchor them," the voice replied. "Print them into belief. Make others live them, not just read them."
Jayden frowned. "You're saying… spread them?"
The page-head nodded.
> "Stories believed cannot be deleted."
---
The Resistance Forms
Back in Graveton, Jayden gathered everyone.
Humans, vampires, former Outsiders, Hollowborn rebels, and Seekers.
He stood atop the storyteller's stage and said:
> "They don't need to kill us to win."
> "They just need to convince the world that we were never here."
> "That our struggles… our freedom… our truth… was just a glitch."
> "We won't let them."
He held up a blank book — its cover dark, its pages empty.
> "We write our stories now."
> "And we write each other's."
The square erupted in firelight and ink.
Voices rose like drums.
And a resistance was born.
---
The Proofkeepers' Threat
As Graveton slept, a ripple passed through the ink sky.
A new message appeared above the city:
> "THE FIRST DRAFT MUST BE RESTORED."
"THIS IS YOUR FINAL REVISION."
Then a number burned into the stars.
> 7
> The countdown had begun.
Seven days until the Final Erasure.
And Jayden had only one weapon left:
A story the world would never forget.