Chapter 5: The Hand That Writes You
> "Not all ink is black. Some is made of forgetting."
— Unknown entry, no date
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Tonight, the stars had no pattern.
They blinked out of rhythm, like eyes trying to send warnings in a language no one remembered.
Ranzō stood on a rooftop that shouldn't exist — the building beneath it gone, the edges crumbling into fog. His coat didn't flutter in the wind. There was no wind.
Only the pressure. That unbearable silence right before something speaks from behind your back.
He looked at his left hand.
There was writing on it. He hadn't written it.
> ❝Don't listen when it says your name.❞
A whisper behind him:
"Ranzō…"
He didn't turn.
He never turned when the world pretended to be someone.
Instead, he took the pen — sharp as memory, cold as guilt — and began writing on the air. The ink floated like smoke, shaping words that shimmered briefly before vanishing:
> "If the world speaks, make sure it forgets what it said."
The ground below trembled — not like an earthquake, but like a heartbeat from something beneath reality.
Then, a hand reached out from the fog — long, thin fingers stitched together with thread made of light. It didn't touch him. It pointed.
To a door.
A door in the sky.
Floating. Waiting.
He walked toward it, the rooftop cracking under his feet, gravity folding in on itself.
As he reached for the handleless door, he realized:
> It wasn't a door at all.
It was a page.
A blank one.
And it had his name already written on the bottom.
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> Some things we write.
Others... write us back.
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