The first thing I noticed was the smell.
Old paper. Dust. And something… coppery.
I opened my eyes to darkness, the only light a thin beam slipping through a crack in the boarded-up window. My head throbbed. The floor beneath me wasn't stone or wood — it was pages. Thousands of them, bound into stacks and scattered across the room like fallen leaves.
When I tried to stand, pain lanced through my left arm. I glanced down. That's when I saw it.
A book.
But not just any book. It was bound directly into my skin. The cover — rough, almost leathery — was my forearm. My veins pulsed along its spine. The moment I realized this, I gagged.
I tried to pull it off. I couldn't. The book pulsed in time with my heartbeat.
Words appeared on its cover, written in a hand I didn't recognize:
Codex of Threads
Write to Weave. Weave to Rule.
"What the hell…" My voice sounded small in the silence.
Something moved in the corner. I spun, only to see a man crumpled against the wall, clutching his stomach. Blood seeped between his fingers. His breathing was shallow.
"You… have to… write…" he rasped, eyes wide with desperation.
I blinked at him. "Write what?"
He pointed weakly at the Codex. "Change it. Save me."
I opened the book. Inside was a single page, blank except for a single line scrawled in black ink:
The stranger dies of his wound.
The words seemed to hum in my skull.
I didn't know why I did it — maybe shock, maybe instinct — but I picked up a nearby quill. My hand shook as I scratched out the word dies and wrote recovers in its place.
The letters bled into the page. The ink shimmered like spider silk. Then… the man gasped.
The wound closed in seconds, skin knitting together as if time itself had reversed. He stared at me, fear flickering in his eyes.
"You… don't know what you've done," he whispered.
Before I could ask what he meant, a low rumble shook the walls. Dust rained from the ceiling. The boards over the window split.
Through the widening gap, I saw them.
Figures without faces. Their heads smooth and pale, as if someone had erased their features with a careless stroke. They tilted toward me in unison, as though smelling something… wrong.
The man's eyes went wide. "They're here. The Blankers."
The nearest one stepped forward, and with every movement, the world around it faded — colors leeching away, sound muffling, even the air thinning. My breath caught in my chest.
"What do they want?" I choked out.
The man's voice was barely a whisper.
"They want the page you just changed."