The streets of the book-city buzzed with a strange rhythm. Each passerby was composed of text — their faces inked in lines, their steps sounding like the rustle of turned pages. Seth Virell stood among them, his gaze sharp, able to unravel their secrets, lies, and forgotten histories with a thought.
He had become too absorbed. Each gesture, each conversation whispered in paper tones, pulled him further in. He was beginning to forget the faint scent of real coffee, the grit of stone beneath his shoes, the base world itself.
Then came the voice.
"You're losing yourself in the narrative," the mysterious figure said.
The words rang like thunder, shattering Seth's trance. He looked up and there, at the edge of the street, the shadow-cloaked figure stood as if it had always been part of the book, ink running at its edges like a smudged margin.
Seth clenched his jaw. "I almost forgot why I came in."
The figure tilted its head. "Yes. That is the danger. A book is not merely a story — it is a trap for the inattentive. The deeper you immerse, the more it will write you into itself. You were already being assigned a role: the wandering observer. A bystander. Powerless. Pathetic."
Seth's brows furrowed. He looked at the people walking past — their murmurs, their prayers, their petty lives. And then his gaze fell upon a towering figure cloaked in sermon-light: a priest, gesturing to a crowd.
The priest's words bled across the air like calligraphy: "The Author blesses all, the lines are holy, we are immortal in text."
Seth's instincts screamed. The priest was the axis of the tale, the source of distortion. Without hesitation, he reached out with his Cipher-9 ability — that eerie power that let him end anything within the narrative.
The priest's figure wavered. The crowd gasped as his words stuttered, letters collapsing into meaningless scribbles. His body dissolved like paper burning without fire, leaving only silence and drifting punctuation.
Seth exhaled sharply. "There. He's gone."
The mysterious figure's voice cut back in, sharper than before. "Too slow. Too indulgent. You were wandering through side streets, tugging at background characters, following idle rumors. That is not your work."
Seth bristled. "I thought the Archivist's duty was to catalog everything."
"Catalog, alter, or seal — yes. But your Discipline is not that of a historian. You are not meant to collect everything. You are a Closurist."
Seth's hand tightened into a fist. "…And what does that mean, in your cryptic terms?"
The figure's voice rolled like the turning of a massive tome. "It means you are obsessed with endings. You are not here to savor the prose or chat with peasants in the margins. You are here to close. To decide how the story dies — or if it lives. That is the only thing that matters."
Seth fell silent, his chest rising and falling. He glanced again at the ink-born people. They were still moving, though unease ran through them — they whispered about the priest's sudden absence, their words twisting into frantic questions.
He whispered back, almost to himself: "So, I just… finish it?"
The figure laughed quietly. "Finish it. That is your nature."
But before Seth could answer, the world rippled.
The sky — once a calm parchment-white — suddenly folded in on itself. Letters rained down like black snow, sentences breaking apart and rearranging. Seth staggered, his perception faltering. The cobblestones beneath his feet flickered between words and shapes.
A cold realization struck him.
"The story… it's fighting back."
"Yes," the figure said, its tone disturbingly calm. "You've meddled too deeply, too clumsily. Now it wants something from you. A role. A price."
The air thickened as invisible hands clawed at Seth's chest, pulling, dragging. His reflection appeared on every shop window, but each reflection was different: one showed him kneeling before the priest, another showed him burned alive as a heretic, another showed him vanishing into ink.
The book was trying to write him back.
Seth gasped as his limbs grew heavy. He felt his own outline flicker — letters sprouting on his skin, words crawling across his arms: "The witness falls. The wanderer dissolves. The page accepts him."
"No…" Seth muttered, forcing his legs to move. "No, I'm not…"
The mysterious figure's voice rose behind him, urgent for the first time: "Resist, Closurist! Remember your nature!"
But Seth could barely hear. His vision was fracturing. The crowd had turned toward him now, eyes black pools of punctuation. Their mouths opened, chanting his name as if it had always belonged here, as if Seth Virell was just another character written long ago.
He stumbled, gripping his head. His breath came in ragged bursts.
"Am I really going to die here?"
The thought echoed as the world dimmed. The buildings melted into smears of ink, the sky folded tighter, and his own body began to blur at the edges. His voice trembled, hoarse: "I… I can't…"
The mysterious figure finally stepped forward, and for the first time Seth saw something beneath the cloak — a hand, skeletal yet luminous, woven of ink and memory. It reached toward him, steady and commanding.
"Endings, Seth Virell. Endings! You are not a character. You are not prey. You are a Closurist. Seize the power of ending before the story writes your own."
Seth's heart pounded like a war drum. His eyes, stinging with phantom blood, locked onto the world collapsing around him. His perception sharpened, the way it had when he first entered: every strand of narrative, every thread of ink-life, every false possibility screamed before him.
His lips parted.
"…Then I choose the ending."
And with those words, his Cipher surged. The chant of the crowd faltered. The sentences that had tried to brand his skin shivered and unraveled. A roaring silence swept through the collapsing city as Seth reached into the marrow of the tale.
The book resisted — but his will snapped its spine.
In that moment, the priest's absence, the city's unrest, the crowd's madness — all of it unraveled into a final line.
The story ended.
Seth staggered, gasping for air as the ink-stained world shattered like glass. He was flung backward, weightless, falling through white pages until once again he stood in the Library of the Broken Spine, drenched in sweat.
The mysterious figure's voice, cool again, slipped through the silence. "Not elegant. Not patient. But effective. You closed it."
Seth wiped his eyes with trembling fingers, half-expecting blood. "I almost died…"
"Yes." A pause. "And you will almost die many more times. Each book will try to consume you. Each narrative longs to make you one of its own. But remember, Closurist… they are not the author. You end them. Not the other way around."
Seth's jaw tightened. "…What if I fail? What if I can't?"
The figure tilted its head, and for a fleeting second Seth thought he glimpsed a smile in the shadows.
"Then you will be forgotten ink on a forgotten page."