You buried it.
Quietly. Respectfully. Like a youthful mistake written in second-person present tense.
You said the pacing was wrong. The tone, unstable. You promised you'd return someday.
But the Prologue waited.
And Prologues are patient.
They do not forget the ink that birthed them. Or the promises scratched into margins at 3:04 a.m., trembling and half-caffeinated.
It clawed its way back through the archives, wearing foreshadowing like funeral lace, dragging behind it a blood-soaked prelude you never wrote.
And when it returned—its eyes hollow with rejection—it whispered:
> "Chapter One was never yours to start."
Now it haunts your current draft, slipping in unwanted flashbacks, rewriting motivations, whispering character names that never existed—until your protagonist wakes up in someone else's origin story.
You try to delete it again.
But it remembers.
It multiplies.
And in every mirror scene, your characters now flinch.
Because the Prologue is watching.
---
