The world ended quietly.
Not with thunder or flame, but with a page turning.
Lucien felt it before he saw it—the air folding inward, the sky flattening into white parchment. The horizon cracked open like a ripped novel, revealing lines of text underneath the earth itself.
Lucien, Sera's voice trembled from the flower pinned to his coat, we're crossing the border.
"Between fiction and the void?"
Between creation and memory.
He stepped forward, and the world beneath his feet changed with each step—grass to ink, ink to glass, glass to letters. The silence was suffocating.
Then came the whisper.
You shouldn't have come here.
Lucien froze. From the sea of white ahead, a figure emerged—tall, cloaked, his outline flickering between real and drawn. His face was half Lucien's, half shadow.
"Evan," Lucien said quietly.
The figure smiled. "Still using my name."
They stood facing each other across a bridge made of script, every word trembling with tension.
"You're rewriting the world," Lucien said. "Killing it."
Evan tilted his head. "Killing your illusion, you mean. Do you really think this place deserves to exist? It's a mistake—my mistake. A story that ran away from its reader."
Lucien took a step forward. "And what does destroying it fix?!"
Evan's eyes glowed crimson. "It ends the lie."
The space around them rippled violently. Ink rained from above, each droplet forming phantom beasts—wolves, serpents, angels—creatures made of text and rage.
Lucien drew his pen-blade. "Then come prove it."
The world screamed.
When the two collided, the bridge shattered beneath them. Words flew like sparks. Every swing of Lucien's blade erased a line of Evan's writing; every stroke of Evan's quill rewrote Lucien's wounds before they could heal.
They weren't just fighting with weapons—they were fighting with belief.
Sera's voice echoed through Lucien's chest.
Focus! Anchor yourself in me!
Lucien exhaled. The flower on his chest flared with light, weaving runes of emotion—grief, love, anger—around him. His strikes grew faster, each one carrying a memory.
"For Sera!"
He slashed through a serpent of ink; it burst into verses and dissolved.
Evan blocked the next strike, their blades locking in a storm of words.
"You still think love can rewrite fate?" Evan sneered. "You're just a copy made of pity."
Lucien gritted his teeth. "Maybe. But at least I feel."
He pushed forward, sparks of ink spraying like blood.
For a heartbeat, Lucien gained the upper hand. He carved through Evan's defense, cutting into his cloak—and gasped.
Beneath the fabric, there was no flesh. Only paper. Layers upon layers of words spiraling inward, each one written in Evan's own handwriting.
"You're… not human anymore."
Evan's grin was cold. "I stopped being human the moment you stole my death."
Lucien, Sera warned, he's fused with the Archive—the space that stores every written world!
Evan spread his arms. The void behind him twisted, revealing shelves stretching into infinity, each book pulsing faintly like a heart.
"This," he said, voice echoing, "is the library where gods fear to read. Every story I've consumed, every ending I've denied—it's all part of me now."
The ink around him thickened, coalescing into an armor of words.
Lucien, Sera's voice trembled, you can't defeat him here.
Lucien clenched his jaw. "Then we change the battlefield."
He stabbed his pen-blade into the ground and wrote in pure light.
The story belongs to those who live it.
The bridge shattered completely. Both of them fell—through the ink, through the white, through the collapsing layers of stories.
For an instant, Lucien saw hundreds of worlds passing by: a kingdom on fire, a child writing her own sky, a god begging for an eraser. Each one burned into him as they fell.
Then—impact.
They landed in a landscape made of broken manuscripts, torn pages floating like feathers. The sky above was dark, stitched together with glowing sentences.
Lucien rose slowly, bleeding ink from his side. "No more rewriting," he said. "This ends with truth."
Evan laughed, low and hollow. "Truth is for readers. Power is for writers."
He raised his quill, and the entire world bent toward him. Mountains of text rearranged themselves into a monstrous form—an enormous eye of ink, its pupil spinning with words:
AUTHOR.
Sera's flower pulsed wildly, threads of light spreading from it.
Lucien, fuse with me—now!
He hesitated. "If I do that—"
We'll become one story. One voice.
He looked at her glowing petals, at the world dying around them, and nodded. "Then write with me, Sera."
Light exploded.
The ink recoiled, the sky split open. Lucien felt her spirit flow into him, filling every corner of his mind with warmth and sorrow. His pen-blade burned white-hot, now half-ink, half-flower.
Evan shielded his face as the light struck him. "What—what are you?!"
Lucien stepped forward, his voice echoing like two hearts beating in unison.
"Not the villain. Not the author. The witness."
He swung his blade, carving a single glowing sentence across the void:
No story deserves to end without love.
The massive ink-eye shrieked, cracks spreading through its form. But before it collapsed completely, Evan raised his hand—smiling through the chaos.
"Good line," he whispered. "Shame it's mine."
And then he vanished into the ink.
Silence fell.
Lucien dropped to his knees, gasping, the fusion light fading around him. The world began to rebuild itself, slowly, painfully.
He's gone, Sera said softly.
Lucien shook his head. "No. He retreated. He's rewriting from somewhere deeper."
Then the real war has only begun.
He looked at the faint glow of the horizon—where crimson letters were beginning to appear again.
Once upon a time…
Lucien clenched his hand, determination hardening his expression.
"Then I'll be ready when he writes the next line."