Novels by Duxtoscrib

Freedom arrived unevenly. In some places, it tasted like relief. In others, like blood. Sael learned this three days after the world stopped listening to maps.They were camped on a rise overlooking a basin that refused to decide whether it was a lake or a field. Water pooled where it felt like it, then receded without apology. The sky above had developed the bad habit of changing its mind halfway through a cloud.Marreth called it “atmospheric honesty.”Sael called it exhausting. He sat with his back against a stone that remembered being a wall once, staring at the horizon while Lysara patched a tear in her sleeve.“You’ve been quiet,” she said without looking up.“I’m counting,” Sael replied.She frowned. “Counting what?”“Mistakes.”She snorted. “You’ll be here a while.”Before Sael could respond, Irix came jogging up the slope, breath sharp, expression tighter than usual. “We have a problem,” he said.Marreth perked up immediately. “Define problem. Are we talking screaming problem

The first thing Sael felt was absence. Not emptiness. Not silence. Pre-definition. The kind of nothing that exists before anyone decides what a thing is for.He woke with that feeling pressing against his ribs, heavy and vast, as if the world were holding its breath again, but this time, it wasn’t afraid. It was remembering. Lysara noticed it first.She was already awake, sitting on a rock overlooking the valley, boots dangling over nothing in particular. When Sael stirred, she didn’t turn.“Do you hear that?” she asked.Sael frowned. “Hear what?”She tilted her head. “Exactly.” He listened. No insects. No distant birds. No wind arguing with leaves. The world wasn’t quiet. It was unfinished.Marreth sat cross-legged near the fire pit, sharpening a blade that didn’t seem to reflect light correctly. “That’s not silence,” she said. “That’s the sound a story makes before someone names the villain.”Irix stood a little apart, hand on his sword, not tense, but respectful, like someone stan

The war did not begin with blood. It began with ink. By the time dawn arrived, late, apologetic, arriving from the wrong direction, three kingdoms had already moved their borders. Not their armies. Their maps.Sael felt it before anyone spoke. A pressure like a migraine behind the eyes, a tug in his chest as if invisible hands were pulling at the seams of the world.“Someone just tried to annex a river,” he muttered.Lysara, tightening the straps on her pack, paused. “Tried?”Sael winced. “Succeeded. For about six seconds.”The ground beneath them shuddered, then settled, a faint scar running through the dirt like a badly erased line.Irix crouched, touching it. “That wasn’t here last night.”“No,” Marreth said cheerfully, twirling her dagger. “That’s a border dispute.”Althus stood very still, face pale, eyes unfocused. “They’re arguing through the Atlas.”Sael turned to him. “How bad?”Althus swallowed. “They’re shouting.” They crested the ridge just as the valley below tore itself

The world did not shatter. It misfired. Morning arrived twice.First as a pale, uncertain light that crept over the hills like it wasn’t sure it belonged there, then again, moments later, brighter, warmer, correcting nothing and apologizing for nothing. Birds sang out of rhythm. Shadows lagged behind their owners by half a step before snapping back into place.Sael woke with the sickening certainty that gravity was optional. He lay still, breathing, counting heartbeats until the ground decided to remain beneath him.“Don’t sit up too fast,” Lysara said from somewhere close. “The sky did that earlier and hasn’t forgiven itself.”Sael huffed weakly. “Did we break the world?”Irix answered instead. “No. We broke its spine.” Sael pushed himself up on his elbows.The camp looked the same at first glance, embers, packs, cloaks, but nothing agreed anymore. The fire burned blue on one side and orange on the other. A fallen log was simultaneously rotting and freshly split. Footprints led away

The sky broke before the ground did. Not with lightning. Not with fire. With agreement.Clouds aligned into a single, flawless plane, stretching from horizon to horizon like a thought too clean to interrupt. The stars dimmed, one by one, as if politely excusing themselves. Wind died mid-breath.The world had decided to stop improvising.Sael felt it in his bones, an old, cold pressure, different from correction. He had felt enforcement. He had felt containment.This was something else. “This isn’t the Atlas reacting,” Marreth whispered, eyes wide. “This is it declaring.”The freed man, still unnamed, still trembling at the edge of self, pressed his hands to his ears. “It’s him,” he said. “The Constant.”The word landed like a verdict. “Explain,” Lysara said sharply.The man swallowed. “Every system needs something it trusts more than itself. A reference point. Someone who never diverged. Never failed compliance. Never… hesitated.”Irix’s knuckles whitened around his sword hilt. “So it

The valley did not celebrate its survival. It simply exhaled.Wind returned first, uneven, curious, tugging at cloaks and embers like it was relearning how to touch things. The fire snapped back into its old, unruly self, sparks leaping where they pleased. Trees leaned again, no longer apologizing for being crooked. Even the stars overhead drifted, some slipping out of place as if embarrassed they had ever lined up so neatly.Sael lay on his back, staring at that sky, lungs burning like he’d swallowed lightning. He was alive. Which felt… negotiable.“Don’t move,” Lysara said, her voice tight as wire. “If you pass out again, I’m not carrying you.”Sael smiled faintly. “You’d try.”“I’d complain the entire way.”Irix crouched nearby, eyes never leaving the figure curled a few paces away. “We have a bigger problem than Sael’s hero complex.”The former enforcer lay on its side, no, his side, Sael realized now. The rigid lines of posture were gone. His shoulders shook. His hands clawed use

Silence arrived like a presence.Not sudden, not loud, but insistent. It had weight. It shaped movement, slowed footfalls, and made the city’s pulse uneven. In Echo City, where alerts and responses had once defined reality, the absence of action became the most active force.Kael felt it first in the residential clusters. People no longer reacted immediately to signals, they paused. Hesitated. Even the small alerts for minor needs flickered longer than usual, like holding their breath before deciding whether to act.“It’s different now,” he said to Lina, standing at a high observation walkway. “People aren’t just not responding, they’re listening.”Lina nodded. “Silence is teaching them what we never could.”They watched a woman in District L kneel beside a cracked pavement tile. She reached into the fissure, hesitated, then withdrew her hand, leaving a small stone in place as a marker. No system prompted her. No one expected her to act. She merely did what felt right in the gap betwe

Space did not stay empty for long. Not because someone filled it, but because people began using it.In Echo City, absence stopped being a pause and became a material. Something that could be shaped, ignored, crossed, or respected. People learned its texture the way they once learned schedules and systems.A plaza in District J became the first experiment.It had been marked three times in one week, signals unanswered, placards quietly noting presence without arrival. Instead of avoiding it, residents started gathering there at odd hours. Not to fix anything. Not to respond to signals retroactively.They gathered because the space felt honest. No performances. No guarantees. Just people sitting far enough apart to choose closeness deliberately.A man brought a chessboard but left half the pieces behind. “If someone wants to play,” he said, “they can bring the rest.”Sometimes no one did. Sometimes someone did. Both outcomes were accepted.Lina observed the plaza from a distance, leani

Absence developed a shape. It wasn’t emptiness. It wasn’t failure. It was something with edges now, felt, acknowledged, even anticipated.In Echo City, people began to recognize the difference between being unseen and being unmet. The city had stopped pretending those were the same.Lina walked through District K just after noon, past a row of closed kiosks and open doors. The absence there felt deliberate, like a held breath. Some shops opened only part of the day now. Some streets remained unlit at night, not from neglect, but from agreement.“We used to think absence meant loss,” Kael said beside her. “Now it feels more like… space.”“Space still scares people,” Lina replied. “Especially when they don’t know what it’s for.”They stopped near a public bench where a small placard had been bolted to the concrete. No logo. No directive.No one came here today. That matters. Kael frowned. “Does it?” “Yes,” Lina said. “Because we’re finally allowed to say it out loud.”The placards had a

The hardest moments in Echo City were no longer the loud ones. They were the unanswered ones.A signal went out from a residential block in District H, low priority, human-generated, non-emergency. The kind that once would have been swallowed by automated triage and quietly resolved before anyone noticed. Now it lingered.A woman stood in her apartment doorway, palm resting against the frame, staring at the soft glow of her interface. Request acknowledged, it read. Nothing followed.She hadn’t asked for rescue. She hadn’t declared distress. She had only marked available to talk, a small flag, tentative, almost embarrassed. Minutes passed. Then ten. Then twenty.The city did not escalate the request. It did not reroute attention. It let the signal exist without interpretation.The woman swallowed, heart racing. Maybe I shouldn’t have sent it, she thought. Maybe this was stupid. She lowered her hand, preparing to close the door.That was when footsteps stopped at the end of the corridor

Echo City did not collapse when help stepped back. It revealed something far stranger.Between the moment when one person released another, and the moment when someone else chose to step in, there existed a gap. A thin, unsettling interval where nothing intervened.The city had never known that space before. It had optimized around it. Erased it. Filled it with protocols, nudges, invisible hands.Now it existed. And it changed everything.Lina stood in a narrow corridor between two districts, a place that used to function as a seamless transfer node. Now it felt unfinished. Not broken, undecided.People slowed when they passed through. Some hesitated, checking overlays that no longer instructed them. Others closed their eyes briefly, as if bracing for a signal that didn’t come.Kael joined her, watching a woman stop mid-step. “She’s waiting,” he murmured.“For what?” Lina asked.Kael shook his head. “For the city to tell her she’s okay.”The woman inhaled sharply, then stepped forward

Echo City learned something quietly dangerous. Letting go felt like failure. Not collapse. Not betrayal. Failure.People had grown used to intervention, first automated, then human, then consensual. But release? Release carried no applause, no proof of virtue. It left behind only uncertainty.And uncertainty had teeth.Lina stood on a pedestrian overpass at dawn, watching the city wake unevenly. Some districts surged early, eager and restless. Others lingered in half-light, lights dimmed by choice, streets left open and empty like unanswered questions.The city was no longer synchronized. It was honest. “Look at that,” Kael said beside her.Below them, a group of volunteers dismantled a temporary support station, carefully, deliberately. No crisis had triggered the removal. No emergency had resolved itself.They were simply done. One woman hesitated before disconnecting the last light strip. “You sure?” she asked the others.A man nodded. “They know where to find us.”The woman swallo

Mark woke to arguing. Not shouting, worse. The kind of quiet, restrained voices people use when they think the person lying between them might still be dead.“…I’m telling you, his vitals don’t make sense,” Elias said. “They’re not bad. They’re wrong.”Tania’s voice was tight. “Wrong how?”“Like something’s still running,” Elias replied. “Not his heart. Something else.”Mark groaned softly. Silence slammed down. “Oh, don’t you dare,” Tania said instantly. “Don’t you dare wake up right now after that.”Mark cracked one eye open. “You’re… welcome?”She slapped his chest, not hard, but emotional. “You idiot.”He smiled faintly. “Still married?”Her eyes filled instantly. “Don’t joke.”Rhea leaned into view, face pale but alive. “Welcome back, anomaly.”Mark tried to sit up. Pain flared, not sharp, but vast, like his body was arguing with the idea of movement. “Don’t,” Elias said. “If you tear something metaphysical, I’m not stitching it.”Mark settled back with a hiss. “Where are we?”“S

The city didn’t make a sound. Not traffic. Not voices. Not even the low electrical hum that usually hid beneath everything. Silence fell like a held breath that refused to release.Mark felt it most sharply, not in his ears, but behind his eyes, like pressure building where thoughts should be. The fractured colors on the screens had vanished, replaced by nothing. No glow. No questions. No arguments. Just absence. “That’s… bad,” Elias said finally, his voice sounding too loud in the quiet.Rhea didn’t respond. She was staring at the dead skyline, face drained, jaw tight. “The Legacy Directive was never meant to activate publicly.”Tania tightened her grip on Mark’s arm. “Explain. Slowly.”Rhea exhaled. “When Heaven was first built, its creators didn’t trust even their own oversight. So they embedded a failsafe, a root authority that predates learning, predates listening.”Mark’s stomach twisted. “A core.”“Yes,” Rhea said. “Unquestioning. Immutable.”Elias scoffed. “So… the worst poss

The city argued all night.Not in one voice. In a thousand overlapping ones, windows lit at odd hours, screens glowing with half-formed thoughts, people pacing their apartments, standing on balconies, shouting across streets. Every conversation felt louder than it should have, like the world was relearning how to disagree.Mark stood on the roof of an old transit hub, the wind tugging at his jacket. Below him, the river reflected a mosaic of lights that never settled into a single pattern.Tania joined him, wrapping her arms around herself. “It’s like listening to a room where everyone talks at once.”Mark nodded. “Heaven’s hearing all of it.”“That’s what scares me,” she said quietly.Behind them, Elias kicked open the roof door and stepped out, carrying three cups of something steaming. “Good news,” he announced. “The vending machine downstairs still works. Bad news? It thinks tea is optional.”Tania accepted a cup. “Optional is the theme of the night.” They stood together in silenc

The city didn’t calm down. It hesitated.Mark felt it as he walked, like every step the city took with him was a question rather than a decision. Neon signs flickered inconsistently. Conversations started, stopped, restarted. People argued with themselves out loud. Some cried in doorways. Some laughed too hard at nothing.Choice had returned. And with it, confusion.Tania walked beside him, shoulders squared, eyes alert. Elias trailed a few steps back, unusually quiet, hands shoved deep into his pockets.“You feel it, right?” Tania asked softly.Mark nodded. “The aftershock.”“Feels like the city doesn’t trust itself yet,” Elias muttered.Mark glanced back at him. “Would you?”Elias snorted. “Fair point.”They reached a small café on a corner that had somehow survived the chaos untouched. The sign buzzed faintly, letters missing. Inside, lights were on, but no one sat at the tables.The barista stood frozen behind the counter, staring at the espresso machine like it had personally bet

The city didn’t celebrate its freedom. It shuddered under it.Mark felt it in the hours that followed, choice flooding back into systems and people like blood rushing into a limb that had been asleep too long. Some screamed. Some laughed hysterically. Some collapsed on sidewalks, overwhelmed by the sudden weight of deciding again.Ambulances screamed through the streets, sirens now chaotic, overlapping, human.Elias leaned against a concrete barrier, hands on his knees. “I’m officially never complaining about traffic again.”Tania sat beside Mark on the curb, her shoulder pressed into his. She hadn’t let go since the tower fell. Mark stared at the skyline.Where the tower once stood, there was nothing but smoke and drifting ash. But he could still feel it. Consequences didn’t vanish when buildings collapsed.They lingered. His phone buzzed again. Tania stiffened. “Don’t tell me it’s Heaven.” Mark looked down. No sender. Just coordinates. And a timer. 00:59… 00:58… 00:57…Elias straigh

The city sounded wrong.Sirens didn’t rise and fall the way they used to. They pulsed, perfect intervals, no overlap, no panic. Traffic lights changed in synchronized waves. Even the wind between buildings felt measured, like it had been given a schedule.Mark stood slowly, legs unsteady, eyes locked on the skyline. Every screen still displayed the same message: CHOICE HAS BEEN SUSPENDED.Tania followed his gaze. Her voice came out thin. “That’s not… that’s not a warning. That’s a statement.”Elias rubbed his arms. “I hate statements like that.”People were beginning to gather on the sidewalks. Not rushing. Not screaming. Just standing there, staring at the screens as if waiting for instructions that hadn’t arrived yet.A man in a business suit checked his watch for the third time, frowned, then stopped moving entirely. A woman halfway through crossing the street froze mid-step, bag dangling from her wrist. A street vendor stared at his cart, hand hovering inches above the lid.Suspen

The city did not announce its turning points. They slipped in sideways, between errands, inside quiet rooms, during moments that never trended. Detroit learned this on a Tuesday.The morning news cycle was thin. No scandals. No fires. No marches. Analysts complained about “nothing to talk about,” which meant the city was finally doing something dangerous. Thinking.Jace Arden felt it before he saw it.He stood at a bus stop near Woodward, coffee cooling in his hands, watching a man across the street argue with himself. The man was mid-thirties, clean jacket, eyes exhausted in a way sleep couldn’t fix. He kept checking his phone, then the clinic sign behind him, then the street.Waiting. But not committing. Jace didn’t move. That had become his discipline, do not intervene unless invited. Presence without gravity. Existing without pulling.The man eventually exhaled, pocketed his phone, and walked away from the clinic. Not relieved. Not saved. Just… undecided.Jace felt the familiar ac

Quiet did not mean peace. Jace learned that the hard way.The city had entered a phase that made people uneasy, the absence of spectacle. No nightly breaking news banners. No screaming pundits. No viral footage of protests or miracles or collapses. The Ledger still existed. The resistance still breathed. But everything moved slower now, like a deep current instead of a crashing wave.Quiet made room for thought. And thought, Jace was discovering, could be dangerous. He spent his mornings walking. No destination. No purpose. Just movement.Detroit looked different when no one was asking him to save it. Buildings felt taller. Streets wider. People heavier somehow, not with despair, but with the accumulated weight of unsolved lives.Outside a corner store, two men argued softly over a lottery ticket. A woman sat on the curb with a cardboard sign that didn’t ask for money, just said LISTEN. Someone knelt beside her, head bowed, not praying. Listening.Jace passed them all like a ghost. He

The city didn’t mourn loudly.It didn’t shut down or riot or light itself on fire the way the networks kept predicting. Detroit mourned the way tired people do, quietly, inefficiently, with long pauses and unfinished sentences. Candles still burned on corners. Names still appeared on walls in careful handwriting. But something fundamental had shifted.The waiting stopped. Jace Arden felt it the first time he stepped outside after Maya’s death. No one rushed him.No hands grabbed his sleeve. No voices begged him to decide things for them. People looked at him, recognized him, then looked away, not out of fear, not even respect, but understanding.Like they knew now. Like they’d learned the cost.Jace walked three blocks before his legs started shaking. He hadn’t realized how much of his balance had come from being leaned on. When that pressure vanished, so did the illusion that he was standing on solid ground.He sat on the steps of a closed-down bakery and let the tremor pass. Across

Burnout didn’t arrive like exhaustion. It arrived like erosion.Jace Arden noticed it in the gaps, moments where his attention slipped, where names took a second too long to surface, where the weight of someone else’s pain landed just a little harder than it should have. He woke up tired even after sleeping. His hands shook when he poured coffee. His temper snapped faster, then collapsed into guilt.He was becoming thin. Not physically. Internally. Detroit had learned his face. That was the problem. People stopped him on the street now. In grocery stores. Outside subway stations. They didn’t ask for autographs. They asked for permission.“Should I stay?”“Am I weak if I can’t handle it?”“My sister signed the form, what do I do?”Jace listened. Always listened. And every answer cost him something. Nora watched it happen with growing alarm.“You can’t be everyone’s anchor,” she said one night as he sat on her kitchen floor, back against the cabinets, head in his hands.“I’m not trying

The backlash didn’t come with sirens. It came with think pieces.Jace Arden learned that the hard way, sitting on the edge of Nora’s couch while her television murmured softly in the background. His face filled the screen, caught mid-sentence, jaw tight, eyes tired.“…while some praise Arden’s intervention as ‘human-centered,’ critics argue that denying individuals the right to opt out of overwhelming memory may constitute a new form of coercion…”Nora muted the TV with a sharp click. “They’re calling you an extremist,” she said flatly. “A romanticization of suffering. A chaos enabler.”Jace rubbed his eyes. “That was fast.”“They were ready,” Nora replied. “Ledger didn’t need to deny anything. They just reframed.”She tossed her phone onto the table. Headlines glowed back at him. WHO GETS TO DECIDE WHO STAYS?IS CHOOSING LIFE ALWAYS ETHICAL?THE DANGEROUS IDEALISM OF JACE ARDENJace exhaled slowly. “They’re not wrong,” he said.Nora stared at him. “Don’t you dare.”“They’re not enti

The Quiet Room was not quiet. It hummed.Not loudly, just enough to remind you that something was always working, always measuring. The sound vibrated through the floor, through bone, through thought, like a held breath that never released.Jace Arden stood in the doorway and felt his resolve thin.The room was circular, walls curved and pale, lined with translucent panels that pulsed faintly as if responding to the people inside them. No restraints. No chains. No guards with guns.Just chairs.People sat in them, six, maybe seven, each alone in their own radius of space, eyes unfocused, breathing slow. Not unconscious. Not sedated. Suspended.Elias stood beside Jace, hands folded behind his back, posture calm enough to be infuriating. “This is where we slow the noise,” Elias said softly. “Where contradictions stop tearing at the mind.”Jace swallowed. “This isn’t therapy.”“No,” Elias agreed. “It’s triage.” Jace’s gaze snapped to the far side of the room. Dex. He sat slouched in a c