The buildings thinned out the farther we ran. Signs no longer rhymed. Awnings drooped like exhausted metaphors. At some point, the air stopped smelling like ink and started smelling like smoke that had given up.
We were in the Margins now.
I wouldn't have known that, except Rin muttered it like a curse.
"The Margins," she said, brushing off a torn flier from her shoulder. "Where forgotten drafts and miswritten characters drift."
"You brought me here on purpose?"
"I brought you away. There's a difference."
The sky was paler here—washed out, like watercolors too thin to hold meaning. Even the people looked… unfinished. Some had blank faces. Others had only one eye. One was just a torso scribbled in pencil, held together by a belt of tape and pure spite.
"Are they—?"
"Sketchlings," Rin said. "Ideas abandoned before they could take shape. Most are harmless. Some aren't."
We passed a hunched figure trying to paint itself into relevance with stolen ink. It hissed at us. I didn't look back.
A few blocks later, we reached a building labeled THE LOOSE LEAF—a tavern, technically, if you could call a pile of stapled napkins and sadness a business. The door was a flap of envelope, the bouncer was asleep under a pile of "Do Not Edit" tags, and the clientele was about 60% legible.
Inside, everything smelled like crumpled metaphors.
A hunched woman with ink-stained fingers waved us over. Her face was overcorrected—lines drawn, erased, redrawn—but her smile was stable.
"Rin," she rasped. "Didn't think I'd see you again."
"I need a Nameforger," Rin said. "Quiet one."
The woman cackled. "They're all quiet. That's the point."
She snapped her fingers, and a panel in the wall unfolded like a secret chapter.
"Go on then," she muttered. "But mind the bleed."
We followed a flickering hallway of redacted quotes and copyright scars until it opened into a cramped workspace lit by hanging bulbs made from punctured inkpots.
The Nameforger sat at the center.
He had no mouth. No eyes. Just fingers. Endless fingers, writing on paper that burned as fast as he wrote it. A mask covered his face—half-stamp, half-calligraphy brush—and his hands moved like regret.
"He can't speak," Rin said. "But he can burn a name into a script if you've earned it. Or fake one if you haven't."
Kairo swallowed. "And you want me to—what? Get a forged name?"
"It's not forgery," Rin said. "It's emergency authorship."
She held out the half-burnt slip from earlier. The name that hadn't taken.
"Try again. We don't have time to wait for your identity to stabilize naturally."
The forger tapped the desk twice.
Kairo stepped toward the Nameforger, heart pounding like a misplaced ellipsis. The forger extended one hand—fingers inked and twitching—then set a fresh parchment between them. It rippled faintly, waiting.
"Focus," Rin said. "This isn't just a name. It's a line break between you and the Smudged Man."
"I thought he could only track me if I stayed nameless."
"Technically true," she said. "But he's not bound by truth. Just by how well people believe it."
Kairo raised the brush, trembling.
The parchment quivered.
He began to write—
BANG.
The back door exploded.
Ash. Paper shreds. A spoon flew past my ear.
"Too late," Rin muttered, pulling her blades. "He's rewriting the edges."
"WHO is?!"
The answer… dripped through the doorway.
Like someone had tried to sketch a man and smudged it with their thumb.
His face was a scribble. His cloak looked like rejection letters. His shadow twitched like bad handwriting.
"The Smudged Man," Rin said.
"Oh good," I said. "A literal creepy."
He slithered in—half ink, half glitch.
"You can't hide in the Margins," he rasped. "You are the Margin."
Great. Cryptic and ugly.
Around him, the tavern began falling apart.
A chair turned into a comma. Someone's half-drunk poem erased itself. One of the sketchlings short-circuited mid-snort and vanished in a cloud of graphite.
Then—
"By order of the Restorers' Guild—!"
Another guy burst in. Robes. Badges. Face like a stapler.
Because obviously, bureaucracy shows up when a demon is eating reality.
The man held up a scroll like it was a sword.
"Unlicensed narrative unfolding! Unauthorized ink manipulation! Suspicious namecraft—!"
Even the Smudged Man paused.
Then wheezed something like a laugh.
"Your rules," he hissed, "are written in pencil."
The walls shivered.
I turned to Rin. "Please tell me we're not trusting him."
"We're not."
"Write!" Rin shouted.
I stared at the parchment.
My hand was shaking. The brush felt like it weighed five kilos. My brain? Empty.
But I wrote it anyway.
Kairo.
The name burned onto the page, ink flaring blue like lightning caught in a bottle.
The forger slammed the sheet down.
FOOM.
The glyph ignited, shooting upward like a firework. The Smudged Man recoiled, his form cracking like a rejected manuscript.
He snarled. Flickered.
"You chose that?" he whispered. "We'll see if it holds."
And then—
Gone.
Erased.
Silence.
The Restorers' guy cleared his throat. "We'll be reporting this."
Rin gave him a two-finger salute that did not mean hello.
I sat down.
Hard.
The paper glyph still glowed faintly against my chest.
"So," I said, staring into the middle distance. "Who is Smudged Man? And why did he just try to delete my face?"
Rin knelt beside me. "He's an echo. A mistake that got too loud. And he hates things that haven't been written properly."
"…That tracks."
"And you, my friend, are very improperly written."