2024-12-27 14:36:14As Selene stormed out, the scrawny worker peeked in, his face pale.
“Uh, sir, the atmosphere got… colder.” Kael sighed. “Back to work. And tell the Reaper and Butcher to stop swinging from the ropes like monkeys.” The scrawny man nodded, then paused. “A pigeon just delivered this. It’s from your father.” Kael opened the letter, his expression hardening as he read. The last line caught his attention: “Your running is over. Come home.” The scrawny worker hesitated at the front of the group, nervously wringing his cap. “Uh, boss… is everything okay? You look… um, tense.” Kael leaned back with a sigh, his expression unreadable. “I have to leave.” The workers exchanged startled glances. “Leave? You? But who’ll keep the peace?” someone blurted out. Kael raised an eyebrow. “If you lot can’t stop fighting without me around, I’ll build a pit before I go and throw all of you in it. Permanently.” The yard went silent. Even the Reaper and Butcher, still recovering from their earlier punishment, looked sufficiently chastised. “But where are you going, boss?” the scrawny worker dared to ask. Kael’s voice was dry. “Cresmont City. My father’s orders.” The workers gasped as if Kael had announced he was heading to a battlefield. “Cresmont City?” The Reaper scratched his head. “Isn’t that where the rich snobs live? What’s your father want you to do there?” Kael stood, brushing dust off his shirt. “He’s arranged a marriage. Wants me to tie the knot with someone named Evangeline.” The Butcher burst out laughing. “You? Married? Boss, I can’t imagine you saying ‘I do’ without rolling your eyes!” Kael shot him a withering look. “Laugh all you want, Butcher. When I come back, your idea of humor might involve scrubbing latrines with your toothbrush.” The Butcher immediately sobered, muttering, “I wasn’t that funny, anyway.” Kael turned to the scrawny worker. “You’re in charge while I’m gone. If anything happens—” “—you’ll turn the quarry into a crater. Understood, boss!” The worker saluted, though his trembling hand betrayed his nerves. Kael narrowed his eyes. “And keep an eye on the Reaper and Butcher. If they so much as sneeze in each other’s direction, I expect a full report.” The scrawny worker nodded vigorously, but as Kael started to leave, he hesitated. “Uh… boss?” Kael paused, glancing over his shoulder. “What now?” The worker shuffled closer, his voice barely above a whisper. “I have a… a favor to ask. It’s a bit personal.” Kael tilted his head, curious. “A favor? From me?” The man swallowed hard. “You see, I… I have a granddaughter in Cresmont City. She doesn’t know about me. To her, I’m just some nameless old man.” Kael’s gaze softened slightly. “Go on.” The worker reached into his pocket and pulled out a small velvet pouch and a folded letter. “Could you… deliver this to her? Tell her it’s from someone who’s always cared about her.” Kael frowned, taking the items. “What’s in the pouch?” “A token,” the man said, his voice steady. “Proof that I’m telling the truth if she ever questions you.” Kael inspected the pouch briefly before slipping it into his coat pocket. “Why not go yourself? You’re her family.” The man shook his head. “I’ve made too many mistakes, boss. She’s better off thinking of me as a nobody.” For a moment, Kael said nothing, then tucked the letter securely into his bag. “I’ll deliver it. But if you’re lying to me, I’ll be back to hang you upside down next to the Reaper and Butcher.” The man bowed deeply, his voice cracking. “Thank you, boss. You won’t regret it.” Kael turned to the workers one last time. “Behave while I’m gone. If I hear one word about trouble, I’ll make you all wish you were born as boulders instead of men.” The workers saluted in unison, shouting, “Yes, boss!” Kael smirked, adjusting his coat as he strode toward the gate. “Try not to burn the place down. I’ll be back before you know it.”
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Chapter 255
The tear widened.Not like paper. Not like sky.It screamed open, as if reality itself had reached its breaking point and could no longer hold its seams together. The margins howled with it—bleeding chronology, bleeding memory.And from that wound came everything the world had once forgotten.Whole timelines—long buried, discarded, pruned from the Tree of Plot—came crashing through like collapsing wavefronts. The bleeding margins quaked, and Subtext warped like a glitching dream.One by one, the alternate realities fell into the world like glass shattering in reverse.A kingdom appeared on a hill that hadn’t existed a second before.An entire species blinked into life—then burned into ash.A river rewound into a volcano, erupting upward from the soil like it was angry to have ever cooled.A child, playing with chalk on a cobblestone path, blinked—then became an old man, screaming, weeping, grasping at memories of parents who had never existed.“This is wrong!” Selene cried. “It’s rewr
Chapter 254
It stood between realities like an ink blot defying grammar.The figure—Draft Zero—wasn’t a man, or a monster.It was the part of a story you were never meant to see.The discarded voice.The original fracture.The wrong sentence, left unspoken for so long it became its own echo.Kael felt its presence like a splinter in his thoughts. Something ancient and misremembered, a half-erased whisper at the foundation of his being.“Who are you?” he asked.But even as the words left his lips, part of him knew.The figure straightened, parchment skin fluttering in nonexistent wind. It had no eyes, no face—only a blankness wrapped in folds of obsolete narrative.“I am what came before, Kael,” it whispered. “Before the first story. Before the first quill. Before the Library carved truth into shelves.”Its voice didn’t travel through sound—it pressed directly into the mind, like a childhood memory reemerging with the wrong details. It turned toward the others—Selene, Pamela, Elias, Riva—and with
Chapter 253
The door opened like a wound.It didn’t swing outward or inward—it simply peeled, like memory detaching from bone, like a truth slowly being admitted. As it parted, light spilled from within—not radiant, but revealing, the kind of light that doesn’t illuminate the world so much as strip it down to the shape of its making.Pamela was the first to move.Despite the warnings in her bones, despite the twitching of glyphs along the corridor walls as if trying to signal “do not enter,” she crossed the threshold with the cautious resolve of a historian walking into a page that should never have existed.Beyond the door was no room, no chamber, no vault.It was a loop.A recursive sphere of memory, repeating endlessly in all directions like an echo locked in glass. In the center of it—curled, flickering, radiant and trembling—was Kael, or rather, the moment Kael first knew himself.⸻It was not a moment of joy. Not triumph. Not even clarity.It was terror.There, at the primal origin of his s
Chapter 252
It began with glyphs.Symbols not etched, but remembered—carved not into stone or bark, but into the soft pliable clay of the world’s forgotten thoughts. They pulsed in the margins like veins beneath a translucent skin, glowing faintly with an inner phosphorescence, casting long shadows that shouldn’t have been possible in a world that had no consistent light source anymore.Elias crouched low near the base of a hill where language itself seemed to weep. His fingers traced the symbols reverently, his brow damp with sweat. He wasn’t deciphering language so much as listening to the sediment of meaning. This wasn’t text—it was subtext. A code carved into silence. A whisper woven beneath the page.“They’re instructions,” he murmured finally, eyes widening. “Or… a confession.”Selene knelt beside him, her own breath shallow. “What do they say?”Elias blinked slowly, as if the words ached to be spoken aloud.“The fusion didn’t end the recursion. It started a descent. There’s another layer…
Chapter 251
The margins bled. They always had—but now the bleeding was slow, syrupy, unnervingly rhythmic. As though the world had found a heartbeat again, and that heartbeat pulsed through torn sentences and decaying metaphors. The stitched edges of reality no longer held neatly; instead, they frayed like threads at the cuff of a forgotten draft. The world wasn’t dying. It was… reconsidering itself.And in the center of that strange, shifting non-place walked Kael.Not the god. Not the mortal. Not the child nor the memory. But the fusion.Gold and grey spiraled in his irises like opposing galaxies caught in collision. His skin shimmered like something written and erased and rewritten. Where he walked, words bent around him—trees leaned to avoid narrative alignment, clouds hovered low as if eavesdropping on a story they couldn’t quite grasp.And he was silent.Not just silent in sound, but in presence. Where Kael walked, conversation fled. Wind forgot to howl. Footsteps muffled themselves. Selene
Chapter 250
The sky was ink.No longer a canvas or a dome, no longer even a concept of weather—the sky above the burning margins bled words. Letters tumbled like ash, catching fire midair, sentences dissolving before they were read. Somewhere, a clock tower chimed without gears. Somewhere else, an ocean recited poetry backwards into salt.In the center of this madness stood Selene, surrounded by the fraying edges of the world. The ritual circle had been drawn in molten ink, each glyph traced from memory, not instruction. The old magic—if it could even be called that—was never meant to fuse two selves from separate narrative threads. But then again, the world was never meant to survive Kael’s story.Selene’s hands were burned black with metaphor.In one, she held the broken quill—Kael’s, the one that ended the war, the one that sealed the Library. It still trembled with the memory of finality.In the other, she held the bleeding pen—Kael-0’s, or perhaps a relic from the first word ever written in
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