Seth Virell opened his eyes and was swallowed by whiteness. It was not the blinding, searing whiteness of light, but the dry, papery pallor of endless pages. Beneath his feet stretched a narrow path, a corridor of parchment that stretched into infinity in both directions, without horizon, without ceiling. His steps echoed—not with sound, but with words, faint ripples of ink that bled briefly into the paper with each step, only to vanish as though ashamed to exist.
"...This is the inside of a book?" Seth whispered, his voice soft but swallowed immediately by the vast white expanse.
He walked. The path yielded nothing at first—only blank parchment. Then, like ink blotting across a once-blank page, the world began to take shape. Paragraphs rose from the ground like cobblestones, curling into streets. Margins grew upward, forming walls. Towers of stacked text bent into the skyline. The words themselves rearranged, paragraphs twisting into lamp posts, advertisements, and shop signs.
And people—people formed out of phrases, sentences etched into the outlines of flesh. They moved, breathed, laughed, and bargained in the language of story. Their words hovered faintly around them like spectral captions.
A city, built entirely from narrative.
Seth froze at the corner of one street, awe pressing into his chest. So this is what it means to step inside a book. This world isn't an imitation. It's alive.
He inhaled slowly, and something stirred within him. His vision stretched outward. Without trying, his perception expanded—spanning the alleys, the market, the cathedral at the city's center. With a blink, his sight jumped across streets as if he had crossed them physically. His mind surged with clarity. Every whispered rumor, every passing lie, every omission hidden between lines—he felt them peeling apart, exposing themselves before him.
A baker smiled at a customer, promising that today's loaf was "fresh." Seth's eyes narrowed. The lie unraveled instantly; the bread had been baked yesterday. A politician delivered a speech in the plaza; he declared himself devoted to the people, but Seth saw the hidden desire, the words unspoken between lines—greed, hunger for control.
"Cipher 9..."Seth thought."Inside the book, I'm like a god."
He raised a hand instinctively, and the world trembled. The speech halted mid-sentence. The letters that made up the politician's mouth unraveled and scattered like dust. Gasps spread through the plaza, but the people's lives bent toward Seth's will as though he had been the author all along.
A thrill and terror coursed through him. He clenched his fist, and reality stitched itself again. The politician's lips reformed, resuming his speech as if nothing had happened.
Seth whispered to himself: "With a thought... I can end anything. Lies burn away before me. Stories cannot resist. If this is the power of Cipher 9... what of Cipher 8? Cipher 7? What happens when my perception stretches not just here, but into Aetheros itself?"
A voice called to him from nowhere, steady and cool, carried in the folds of the parchment wind:
"Remember, Seth Virell: you are here not to play god, but to decide. Catalog, alter, seal. To wield this power carelessly is to become a character yourself, swallowed by narrative."
The mysterious figure's words echoed like chains rattling in his skull. Seth flinched. He looked around, but saw no figure this time—only the city. The voice had come from the margins of the world, where the parchment bent inward like the edges of a book.
He muttered, "So you're watching me, even here."
Seth walked further into the city. People bustled, oblivious to him, yet every one of them was a story waiting to be cataloged. He passed a beggar whose sign read Once a Prince, Now Forgotten. He passed a child whose eyes glowed with unwritten prophecy. He passed a masked merchant selling bottles of "memory" distilled from erased chapters. Each presence tugged at him—threads begging to be pulled.
He clenched his jaw."If I decide wrongly, do I erase them? Do they vanish?"
A woman stumbled into him, her body half-faded, as though an eraser had scraped across her outline. "Please," she rasped, clutching his sleeve. "The author abandoned me mid-sentence. I can't finish my thought. I don't want to disappear."
Her eyes were pools of missing ink, empty. Seth's throat tightened.
Before he could answer, his perception surged again—an instinct from his Cipher. Words bloomed above her head like subtitles: A character introduced to create sympathy, never developed further. Disposable.
The lie was her form itself. She wasn't abandoned. She was written to suffer.
Seth whispered, almost to himself, "So this is the cruelty of narrative..."
He had three choices, he knew, though no one told him:
Catalog: Record her as she is, preserve her role, and let the story unfold unchanged.
Alter: Rewrite her, give her more than what the author intended. But that risked destabilizing the tale.
Seal: Remove her entirely, consigning her existence to the void so her fragment wouldn't leak into reality.
Her fingers trembled on his sleeve. "Don't erase me..."
Seth's hand hovered. His perception whispered probabilities—futures of her continued suffering, the ripple her existence would cause if preserved, the instability if altered.
At last, he whispered: "I'll catalog you. But not as disposable."
He raised his hand, and words bled into the air. A new line etched itself into the parchment sky:
—She became a witness, her pain a truth others could not ignore.
The woman solidified. Her eyes filled with ink again. Tears welled, and she bowed to Seth before fading into the crowd, her story now sealed into permanence.
Seth exhaled, heart pounding."So this is the weight of an Archivist... every life I touch bends or ends because of me."
He wandered deeper, testing his power. With each blink, he leapt across districts. His mind painted the city as a whole, thousands of narratives weaving and colliding. Lovers meeting by chance. Kings plotting betrayal. Children dying unnamed in alleys. He could touch any thread. Snap it. Strengthen it. Rewrite it.
The sheer scope was intoxicating. He whispered to himself:
"If Cipher 9 grants me this much control inside a book... then when I reach Cipher 8... maybe I can impose my edits on Aetheros itself. Imagine... altering lies in the real world. Ending stories before they begin. Gods would tremble."
But then, the voice returned, colder this time:
"Remember, Seth Virell. Archivists are not creators. You are not the Nameless Author. Power without restraint will bleed you into the narrative. The ink does not forgive."
Seth gritted his teeth. "You think I don't know that? But how am I supposed to hold back when everything here begs for judgment?"
His voice echoed across the parchment skies. The city trembled, a shudder running through the words themselves. For a moment, the citizens looked up—as if sensing the god above them. Then, as quickly as it came, the tremor passed, and the story resumed.
Seth stood in the plaza at last, staring up at a cathedral formed entirely from capital letters stacked like stones. A sermon echoed from within, telling of salvation. But Seth's eyes pierced the text. He saw the priest's words were hollow, a manipulation designed to bind the people. The congregation's "faith" was nothing but an ink trap, a mechanism to keep them on the page.
His Cipher whispered:"Seal. Seal. Seal."
Seth clenched his fists. His body trembled with the temptation to unravel the cathedral, to end the priest, to free the crowd. His mind screamed:"Am I their savior—or their executioner?"
He whispered, "What kind of Archivist do you want me to become?"
But there was no answer. Only the blank expanse of sky, waiting for him to write.