He was back.
The lightless white world had spat him out into a different Veridian. Or rather, a version of it pulled through a filter of rot and distortion. Streets shifted when he blinked. Windows bled. The sky was stitched together with thread and screaming.
The hand of the Editor still burned on his arm. Where it had gripped him, the skin was scorched with gold-lined glyphs. They pulsed with ink, like a heartbeat made of forgotten paragraphs.
And at night—Kiran began to hear it.
The whisper.
At first, it came just before sleep. A low hiss. Like the sound of a page being turned underwater.
Then it spoke.
Not in words.
In knowing.
He would jolt awake from dreams soaked in sweat and shadow. His fingers would twitch, making runes he couldn't understand. His mouth would form names never meant to be spoken aloud. He awoke screaming syllables not of any tongue—until the walls around him would melt and reform.
The glyph on his chest—dormant since the last battle—now pulsed in sync with the whispers. As if the voice beneath the world had always been part of it.
Or him.
In his dreams, he wandered a plain of shadows.
Not darkness. Shadow.
There were forms, yes—endless fields of jagged spires made from calcified narrative. Trees that wept dialogue from stories that never made it past draft. And above it all, a sky like a manuscript on fire.
Something moved across the plain.
Kiran couldn't see it, not fully. But it watched.
Always.
And it whispered with thousands of mouths.
"You do not belong, but you remain."
"You are not character. You are not author. What are you?"
"The script has no place for you, yet your mark bleeds ink across every page."
He tried to speak.
But in this place, his voice unraveled mid-sentence, curling into thread and stitching itself into the sky.
He began to lose time.
One moment he'd be crossing a ruined courtyard; the next, standing in front of the dead shrine of a long-forgotten Beast god, not knowing how he got there.
He'd wake up in alleyways with ink bleeding from his eyes.
Sometimes, his reflection would smile when he wasn't.
Sometimes, it would look afraid.
Kiran knew he had to do something.
Find something. Himself, if nothing else.
He went to the ruins of the library—long since collapsed in a previous corruption wave. Buried beneath the rubble were records. Names. Registries. Fragments of the world's original structure.
He clawed through ash and splinters, ignoring the bruises and the blood.
What am I?
What was I before?
Not Rayhan. Not Kiran. Not entirely.
The whisper grew louder as he dug.
It guided him.
A memory shard—paper fused to glass—unfolded like a hologram as he touched it.
A vision.
A child. Alone. In a blank space. Crying. The shadows holding him gently.
Then: a quill.
Writing a name.
His name.
But not on a page.
Into his skin.
The woman with ink-filled eyes appeared again. Not in person. In the vision.
"You weren't born here," she said. "You weren't even written in. You were revised in."
"What does that mean?" Kiran asked.
"You were the edit. The footnote. The error embraced."
She looked at him with her empty sockets.
"And now you're the weapon."
Then she burned.
Ink flames. Screaming. Pages flew everywhere—each one with his face drawn in different styles. Different ages. Different fates.
He woke beneath the rubble, clutching a bone-ink quill.
The whisper was no longer whispering.
It was chanting.
He wandered toward the outer edge of Veridian.
There, something called.
A monument no one had ever noticed. A spire of cracked obsidian shaped like a closed book.
The moment he stepped into its shadow, his mark blazed.
And he remembered.
Not everything.
But why he had been brought here.
Not summoned by a god. Not pulled by a story. Not written by an author.
He had been chosen by the dark between words.
The silence in the gaps.
The editors cut him—but the world bled ink instead.
He touched the spire.
And it opened like a mouth.
Inside, a stairway spiraled down.
Into a place that was never supposed to exist.
He stepped inside.
And behind him, reality began to fold.
The glyph on his chest split—cracked into several smaller symbols.
He could feel them now. The other ones. The Others like him.
But far fewer than there should be.
Most had been consumed.
He took the first step downward.
The whisper followed.
"You are the unwritten sentence."
"You are the final redaction."
And far below, something smiled.