Dan opened his eyes. He was lying on the cold floor of a white room, the walls stretching endlessly in every direction. A figure stood before him—pale, translucent, with eyes like frost.
"Where am I?" Dan whispered.
"You're dead," the ghost said flatly. "Didn't I warn you? Your story was ending."
"No... this can't be real. I have a family!" Dan's voice cracked.
"I have other characters to get to. You were just a placeholder." The ghost replied.
"Why me? Couldn't you have let me survive the seizure? I just needed insulin…" Dan's voice trembled.
The ghost shook its head. "I can't rewrite the past. And honestly? You weren't a character I put much thought into."
Dan's face flushed. "Then why write me at all? Just to kill me?"
"I needed a way to introduce Felix—your son. His arc matters."
"Don't write about Felix," Dan snapped. "Not if you're going to ruin his life too."
"Stories need suffering. No one gives a damn about characters who live quiet, happy lives—they're forgettable."
Dan stepped forward, voice sharp. "Come on now! I bet you don't even know where this story is going!"
"I do and I don't," the ghost replied, indifferent. "Ideas keep popping into my head. I just want to finish the story quickly and make some money. Anyway, my cat's meowing—I have to feed her."
The ghost had vanished, leaving behind nothing but silence and the sterile hum of the white room. No doors. No windows. No escape.
He wandered the space, searching for cracks, for seams, for anything that might suggest this was a dream. But the walls were perfect. Immaculate. Eternal.
Time didn't pass here. It simply hovered.
Dan sat down, his back against the wall, and stared into the void. He thought of Felix—his son, his legacy. Would he remember him? Would the ghost twist Felix's life into something unrecognizable, just for the sake of drama?
Dan clenched his fists, but there was no one left to fight.
"I don't want to be forgotten," he whispered.
Nothing but silence. Characters without pages fade. And Dan, stripped of narrative, of purpose, of breath, began to dissolve—not with pain, but with quiet inevitability.
His final thought was absence.
Then nothing.
The white room waited, hungry for the next story, like blank paper.