2025-12-13 21:29:27The fires began at dawn.
Across the city, the orange glow of burning paper rose above rooftops like new suns-pitiless, devouring, state-sanctioned. Uniformed men and women stood before piles of books, their faces expressionless as pages curled and blackened. Smoke mingled with fog, drifting through narrow streets where protest chants cracked like gunfire.They called it The Cleansing of Words.Government decrees ordered the destruction of every known copy of The Book of Fire--physical, digital, or otherwise. Libraries received sealed instructions: surrender, burn, report. Failure meant imprisonment for “possession of treasonous literature.” Even private collectors were not spared; armored trucks pulled up to wealthy estates, seizing banned volumes like contraband relics.On the front steps of the National Library, cameras captured the first sanctioned pyre. A crowd gathered--journalists, students, elders clutching signs. Riot police formed a perimeter, their viso
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Hugo’s Trap
Hugo Martinez had always preferred theater to war. He wore it like a cloak--precisely tailored, perfumed, and staged so that even his lies had the cadence of truth. In the months since the Book of Fire, the theater had become his armory. Cameras were soldiers. Speeches were strategy. Tonight’s play will be both curtain and knife.The venue was ridiculous by design: the old opera house on the river, its grand columns bleached by floodlight, its chandelier a crown of crystal that somehow still kept a dignity the men beneath it no longer deserved. Hugo chose it for the symbolism --culture above the docks, light over grime. The city would watch kings’ step onto its marbled stage and believe, for a heartbeat, in negotiation instead of blood. Better still: be able to film both brothers walking into the same frame and call it civility.Diego received the invitation wrapped in velvet diplomacy. An intermediary, a mayor’s aide with trembling hands and too-bright teeth, whispered pr
Diego’s Crisis
The rain had washed the streets into rivers of filth and memory.San Paloma’s southern alleys--once humming with laughter, street vendors, and music that spilled from cracked windows--were now hollow ruins. The neon lights of the clubs flickered like dying embers in a storm, and the scent of smoke lingered even where no fires burned.Diego Flinch stumbled through one of those alleys, soaked to the bone, his coat torn and heavy with grime. The years of war had stripped the king’s shine from him; his hair, once slicked with vanity, now clung to his forehead in tangled strands. His eyes, dark and red-veined, darted around as though the shadows themselves whispered secrets.He had returned here--their alley.The one where he and Harold used to hide as boys, when the city was cruel but not yet monstrous.The graffiti still screamed on the walls: crowns, knives, slogans from a younger, dumber age. But now, the crowns bled. Someone had painted over them in dripping
The Firestorm
The night began with silence. The kind that precedes catastrophe, where even the wind seems to draw breath in anticipation.At precisely midnight, the city of San Paloma ignited--not in a single explosion, but in a thousand simultaneous ruptures. Bridges convulsed under the weight of detonation, substation lights flared like dying stars, and the skyline blinked in chaotic Morse code. A new language had arrived--one written not in ink or blood, but in fire.Harold Flinch stood at the heart of the maelstrom, deep in the bunker that now served as both sanctuary and throne. Around him, a dozen monitors mapped the destruction in real time: plumes rising from financial towers, network grids collapsing, police channels overrun with panic. Every keystroke, every detonation, every leak had been planned with mathematical precision. The Writer’s war had become a scripture.He had triggered it all with one command.A single word typed into his encrypted terminal: “Ignite.”<
Harold’s War Room
The bunker breathed like a living machine.Fluorescent lights hummed overhead, casting pallid halos over walls layered in maps, newspaper clippings, and digital screens. Every corner glowed with the soft pulse of data: ports blinking, surveillance feeds shifting, strings of code flowing like blood through the veins of a dying empire.Harold Flinch sat at the center of it all, hunched over a steel desk scarred with burn marks and spilled ink. His fingers tapped an arrhythmic pattern against the tabletop --a habit born of exhaustion rather than thought. The War Room, once his cathedral of reason, now felt like a mausoleum of obsession.The maps had evolved since the early days. Each territory was color-coded:Red pins for Hugo’s loyalists --the politicians, the police chiefs, the bankers laundering virtue.Blue pins for Diego’s empire --the nightclubs, the dockyards, the warehouses humming with quiet defiance.But tonight, Harold noticed what had been slo
The Book Burnings
The fires began at dawn.Across the city, the orange glow of burning paper rose above rooftops like new suns-pitiless, devouring, state-sanctioned. Uniformed men and women stood before piles of books, their faces expressionless as pages curled and blackened. Smoke mingled with fog, drifting through narrow streets where protest chants cracked like gunfire.They called it The Cleansing of Words.Government decrees ordered the destruction of every known copy of The Book of Fire--physical, digital, or otherwise. Libraries received sealed instructions: surrender, burn, report. Failure meant imprisonment for “possession of treasonous literature.” Even private collectors were not spared; armored trucks pulled up to wealthy estates, seizing banned volumes like contraband relics.On the front steps of the National Library, cameras captured the first sanctioned pyre. A crowd gathered--journalists, students, elders clutching signs. Riot police formed a perimeter, their viso
The Death of a Ghost Hand
The broadcast began without warning--just a black screen flickering to life in the middle of Harold’s encrypted feed. The usual static was replaced by a cold, fluorescent room. A man sat chained to a steel chair, his face swollen and bruised, his shirt torn to ribbons. Ivan.He’d been with Harold since the early days of the movement--one of the first Ghost Hands, a man who believed that information was more dangerous than bullets. He had a habit of humming old war songs when the servers overheated, saying it kept the ghosts calm. Now his mouth bled with every breath, but his eyes still burned.Two officers stood beside him, their uniforms marked with the Ministry’s insignia. One held a tablet streaming the interrogation live to thousands of watching citizens. Hugo Martinez’s face appeared briefly on the corner of the screen--a silent approval, a signature of state cruelty.“Name your employer,” one of the officers demanded. “Who is The Writer?”Ivan laughed--a dr
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