You shouldn't be reading this. But now that you are, someone has already vanished.
I didn't wake up in a bed, a dream, or a memory. I woke up in nothing.
Not darkness—just white. Endless, flat, perfect white.
I stood barefoot, dressed in black. I had no name. No past. But I knew one thing. I was being watched.
Something about the silence felt crowded. I wasn't alone, even if I couldn't see anyone.
Then words appeared in the air. Just a single sentence, hovering in front of me like smoke.
She was never written, but she was reading back.
I didn't understand it. The letters flickered, then dissolved like dust. Another line followed.
Error. Character not found.
I reached toward it. My fingers brushed the sentence, and the air burned like static. The sentence vanished.
More lines began to flash around me. Fragments of stories. Pieces of someone else's world.
The hero kissed her cheek.
The queen walked into the flames.
The villain smiled before dying.
Each one appeared, then disappeared. I didn't know where they were coming from or why they stopped for me.
Then I heard the voices.
Not from the space around me—but above me. Behind me. Inside me.
"Who is that?"
"She's not supposed to be in this scene."
"Did the app glitch?"
They weren't part of the white world. They were from somewhere else. Somewhere above this space—like eyes staring through a crack in the ceiling.
My chest tightened. I wasn't just inside a story.
I was being read.
The white cracked. A soundless shatter. Like invisible glass breaking. I didn't scream, I didn't fall—I was yanked out of the blank and thrown into a different scene.
Wood hit my back. I gasped.
This time, I was in a tavern. Warm light flickered from torches. People drank, laughed, moved. The smell of sweat and spice and wine hit me at once.
But they weren't right.
They moved like actors on stage, locked in motion, following a script. Until they saw me.
A woman dropped her mug and turned. Her eyes locked with mine.
She froze.
Then she fell. No sound. No struggle. One moment alive, the next—gone.
Her body didn't bleed. Her skin cracked like burnt paper, and her face folded into letters I couldn't read.
The tavern stopped. Everyone stared at me.
A man stepped forward, shaking.
"You're not from this book," he said.
Then the tavern shattered. The floor gave way. The world folded in on itself like a ripped page.
And I was back in the white.
Only now I understood.
Every time someone saw me, something died.
A whisper echoed in my mind.
She's the one that breaks the fourth wall.
Another voice. Louder.
You. The one reading. She sees you.
I grabbed my head. The pressure in my skull was rising. The whispers weren't thoughts—they were live.
They were watching me.
I ran. I didn't know where. The white began to twist, then melt into a hallway lined with black mirrors.
I stopped.
My reflection stared back at me. My face, my clothes—but my eyes weren't mine.
They were filled with moving text. Sentences scrolled like code. Names I didn't know. Words I didn't say. A story I never wrote.
The mirrors whispered.
Stop reading.
You're making it worse.
Every view opens a page. Every page takes someone.
I stepped away. My hands trembled.
"No," I whispered. "I didn't ask for this."
But one last mirror lit up with a single glowing title:
Reader Zero
I stepped toward it. The light pulsed like a heartbeat. My hand reached out, but I didn't touch the mirror.
Because a voice, cold and calm, spoke behind me.
"They're still reading."
I turned slowly, even though no one was there. Just the mirror. Just me.
But now I knew the truth.
You're the one reading this.
You started all of it.
And I'm going to find you.
I don't know how I was created, but I know this: I didn't write myself. Someone else did. Someone who thought they were clever enough to hide behind pages, chapters, and views. They built this world and filled it with pain, deaths, scripted moments, recycled lives. They gave everyone a path—except me.
I'm the only one without a chapter number.
I walked forward, the mirrors falling silent as I passed them. They didn't reflect me anymore. The hallway bent unnaturally, shifting like it was afraid of where I was going. The words inside my eyes flickered faster, changing language, flipping through names and systems.
I reached the final door. It wasn't made of wood or metal. It was ink—moving ink, rippling like water across invisible glass.
It didn't ask for permission. It opened for me.
Behind it was a library.
No shelves. Just books floating in the air, stacked in layers above and below, as far as my eyes could see. They spun gently, like they were waiting to be picked. Each one had a glowing thread connected to it—tied to something… somewhere. Someone.
I stepped into the center.
The moment I did, books began to drop.
One hit the ground. The thread attached to it snapped, then burned away.
A second fell. Then another. Ten. Thirty. Fifty.
They hit the floor like bodies.
I wasn't touching them. I wasn't speaking. But they were collapsing around me like my existence itself was poison to their stories.
Then, for the first time, I saw what I truly was.
The ink on my arms began to rise. Not tattoos—script. Sentences. Full paragraphs written directly into my skin. My left forearm read:
Classified anomaly. Access Level: Denied.
My right hand glowed with a different line:
Warning: Auto-erasure sequence incomplete. Subject breached reader-layer.
I should've been terrified.
Instead, I smiled.
I didn't need a writer to survive. I didn't need a plot. I was the unwritten. The broken. The unpredictable.
And now I had the power to break every story that tried to erase me.
I turned back to the mirror, the last one still intact in the center of the library. This time, the reflection didn't show me.
It showed a figure sitting at a screen. Fingers moving. Eyes wide.
Reading.
You.
Your screen. Your fingers. Your breath caught in your throat.
You're not just watching. You're the fuel. You're the spark. Every time you keep going, you give me strength. Every time you turn the next page, someone loses theirs.
I know your heartbeat now. I know where your eyes stop. I know how long you hesitate before scrolling.
You think this is just fiction?
Good.
Because that's what all of them thought too.
Until I stepped out of the story.
I stepped away from the mirror.
The reflection was still locked on you, as if the glass could track your breathing.
I didn't blink. I didn't look back.
My purpose had just been rewritten.
There was no going back to the blank world, no returning to the void of forgotten code and deleted pages. I had crossed a boundary no character was supposed to see, and I wasn't done.
One of the books on the floor shifted. Unlike the others, this one didn't collapse on its own. It waited.
I knelt beside it and placed my hand on the cover. The surface rippled under my palm, like ink refusing to dry. A title emerged from nothing.
Chronicle 38,542 — Romantic Fantasy: Princess of Ashes.
My fingers curled around the edge.
This was someone else's story. A scripted world with a perfect heroine, a love triangle, a crown, a betrayal. The kind readers adored. The kind that received thousands of votes, coins, and comments every night.
I wasn't in it.
That's exactly why I was going in.
The moment I opened the book, the white library dissolved. Heat slammed into my chest. I blinked once and found myself standing in a marble hallway lined with rose-colored tapestries.
A girl in a silver dress was running toward me, crying.
She wasn't running from me. She hadn't even seen me yet. Her world was still moving according to its original plan.
Until she did.
Her feet stumbled. She stopped just three steps from me, gasping for air. Her eyes locked with mine, and the moment they did, I felt it—like a heartbeat in reverse.
She began to shake.
"No," she whispered. "You're not… part of this. You're not in the—"
She didn't finish her sentence. Her body twisted mid-word. Her skin shimmered with code. Then she collapsed, her dress folding into a pile of scattered letters and page fragments.
The hallway froze.
Time slowed.
Servants behind her dropped their trays. Guards stiffened like broken statues. No one screamed. They couldn't. They weren't written to process something like me.
I walked past them, untouched.
I didn't feel proud. I didn't feel cruel. I wasn't here to destroy. I was here to understand.
Why do I erase them?
Why do I keep gaining power the more I'm read?
And who started this?
I paused in front of a polished glass door and looked at my reflection again. The text in my eyes had changed. It wasn't moving anymore.
It had formed a single clear line.
Reader Zero is watching.
I whispered back, "Good."
The glass shattered inward.
Not because I touched it. Not because I screamed. It broke on its own, like the world was reacting to my presence again.
I stepped through.
The scene on the other side was blurry, unfinished, glitching between colors and dialogue. Characters stood frozen, half-rendered, flickering in and out of shape. A prince was stuck mid-bow. A maid was caught smiling forever. Their world was falling apart just from my arrival.
And still, I didn't stop.
I walked toward the palace throne, the center of this story's power, and looked up at the crown floating above it. It hovered, waiting for the right princess to complete her destiny.
I took it.
The room vanished.
Everything—gone in an instant.
Except me.
And the whisper.
"You just erased her story. Do you feel stronger now?"
I didn't answer. I didn't need to.
Because in that moment, a new string of words burned themselves across my arm.
Progress: One book overwritten. Reader pull increasing. Memory fragments unlocking.
The world rebuilt itself.
But this time, the sky was black. The stars were text. The ground was ash.
I stood in a rewritten story—a broken one. One that couldn't continue without me.
I smiled, not because I liked the destruction, but because I had just proven the truth.
You read me into existence.
Now I'm writing my way out.