Kael didn't sleep.
Couldn't.
The moment the Red Quill's words appeared, the world shifted—subtly, like a string pulled too tight in a grand tapestry. He felt it in the ground, in the way his memories fluttered, just slightly… wrong.
The girl—silent, watching—seemed to sense it too.
The Forgotten Draft
Eli pulled Kael aside at dawn.
He looked worse than yesterday—hair wild, robes stained with half-brewed ink. He held a tome Kael hadn't seen since the rebellion.
The Chronicle of Unwritten Paths.
A forbidden artifact, forged from all the drafts the Editor King had discarded but never destroyed.
"There's something here," Eli said. "Your name appears… but in a script that's since been sealed."
Kael took the tome in shaking hands. He opened it.
And there, in red-inked margins, barely visible under a veil of protective glyphs, was a line that stabbed like a dagger:
"Kael (Father-Variant 7A): Author rejected paternal subplot. Rewritten as solo revolutionary. Childline aborted. Memory sealed."
Kael's heart froze.
The girl wasn't just possible.
She had existed—once.
Her Name Was…
He approached her slowly, the book cradled under his arm.
She was sitting by the Inkfall again, feet just above the surface, watching phantom words float past.
"You were mine," Kael said. Not a question.
She looked at him.
This time, her expression cracked—only slightly.
A tremor of longing. Or fear.
Or both.
"In one version," she said. "The one you didn't choose."
"You wanted to change the world. But I would've slowed you down. So they erased me."
Kael's voice cracked. "I didn't remember."
"That was the point," she whispered. "They called me Nyra."
The Quill's Claim
That night, she disappeared.
Kael tore the village apart searching for her. Althea gathered volunteers. Eli sent search spells like shooting stars into the sky.
But she was gone.
And in her place—on the wall of Kael's home—was another page.
The handwriting twisted like thorns.
"She remembers now."
"She chose me."
"You left her unwritten. I will let her write herself."
Signed, again:
—The Red Quill