: Avreth's Manuscript
They stood in a world made of sentences.
Each breath they took was ink. Each blink, punctuation. The ground beneath them was parchment stitched with veins of memory, and above them floated an eternal draft, never finished, never stopped.
And at the center of it all sat Avreth.
No face. No body. Only a robe of unraveling ideas, a desk shaped from the corpses of deleted characters, and a single, ever-moving hand wielding a quill of bone.
It didn't acknowledge them.
It didn't need to.
The world acknowledged it.
Grey's hand instinctively reached for his sword, but his blade was gone.
Erased.
Chris conjured flame—but it curled and died midair, snuffed out like an unwanted subplot.
Even Kairo, whose foresight had once broken time itself, felt blind. No visions. No future.
They were inside the draft of something still being born.
Avreth continued to write.
And with each word, something in the real world shifted.
A city disappeared. A forest collapsed. Stars blinked out, one by one.
This wasn't editing.
This was authorial genocide.
Chris stepped forward.
"This isn't creation," she said. "It's destruction by perfection."
Avreth didn't stop writing.
Kairo whispered, "He's rewriting the world. No flaws. No unpredictability."
"No stories," Grey muttered, stepping beside them. "Just control."
Chris yelled. "Wale tried to contain you. You turned him into a villain, but he was a prison. You're the disease."
Finally, the quill stopped.
And Avreth looked up.
Its face was a mirror.
But not of them.
Of Wale.
Twisted. Weeping. Endlessly redrafting himself into oblivion.
The voice that followed wasn't spoken. It was written, appearing midair:
"Wale was my first draft. You are footnotes."
The world shook.
Script fell like hail from above—weaponized narrative, stories sharpened to blades.
Chris ducked as one sliced past her cheek, cutting not flesh, but memory.
She gasped.
Grey turned—"What did it take?!"
"My name," she said breathlessly. "It just took my real name."
Kairo threw up his arms in defense. "It's attacking our definitions. It's rewriting what we are."
They scattered, diving behind broken paragraphs as the manuscript storm worsened.
Kairo shouted over the chaos, "We can't kill it. Not like this."
Chris narrowed her eyes. "Then we rewrite it."
"But how?" Grey called. "We have no quill. No ink. Nothing—"
Chris looked at her palm.
There, burned into her skin by the staircase's final page, was a single word:
"Author."
Not a title. A role.
A key.
Kairo reached into his robes and pulled out the last mirror—Wale's prison. Cracks had begun to spread across its surface.
"He's still in there," Kairo said. "Still alive. Barely."
Grey looked at the mirror, then at Avreth.
"Then we use him."
Chris didn't hesitate.
She pressed the mirror to her chest.
Light tore through her.
A scream—half hers, half Wale's.
And suddenly, she remembered everything.
Wale's memories. His origins. His rebellion.
He hadn't chosen to be a monster.
He had been written to be one.
By Avreth.
The light exploded.
Chris rose, eyes flickering between flame and ink.
Her voice echoed with two tones.
"Avreth," she said, "your draft ends here."
The entity stood, rising to its full, impossible height. Its body was now composed entirely of prose—millions of stories crawling over each other, all trying to overwrite the others.
Grey stepped beside her. "Even monsters deserve a better ending."
Kairo nodded. "Let's revise history."
They charged.
But this was not a battle of blade and fire.
This was a war of intention.
Every move they made had to be written into existence. Every strike was a sentence. Every defense, a metaphor.
Chris wrote in flame—twisting language into barriers, hurling fire-forged metaphors at Avreth's unraveling form.
Grey wielded logic—cutting through paragraphs with declarations of truth, severing false narratives mid-birth.
Kairo bent possibility—plucking lines of unused prophecy and shaping them into shields.
The battlefield became a novel in motion.
But Avreth was too old.
Too vast.
Too embedded in the core of storytelling.
He whispered a word—and Grey vanished.
Just gone.
Chris screamed. "Where—?!"
Kairo touched her shoulder, sorrow in his eyes.
"He's been unwritten."
Chris gritted her teeth. "Then I'll rewrite him."
She hurled a page of Wale's memory into the storm.
A boy.
A reflection.
A choice not taken.
Avreth recoiled—but only for a moment.
Then it smiled, splitting open a thousand mouths.
"You are all drafts."
And it began to erase them.
Kairo fell next—his body turning to ink, slowly sinking into the floor.
He smiled.
"I always saw this. But I came anyway."
Chris knelt by him. "You're not just a prophecy. You're a friend."
Kairo placed a single page in her hand.
"Write an ending."
And then he was gone.
Alone, she stood.
One page.
One flame.
One chance.
Chris raised her hand.
And began to write.
"This is the story of a monster. Not born, but written."
"His name was Wale."
"He wanted to understand humanity."
"And the only way to do that—was to be rewritten."
Avreth roared.
Its form cracked.
The stories began to fall apart.
Chris walked toward it, each step rewriting the ground beneath her.
"You created Wale as a cage," she whispered. "But in doing so, you taught him how to break free."
She held up the page.
And on it was written:
"Let the monster choose his ending."
From within her flame, Wale stepped forward.
No longer bound.
No longer a reflection.
He looked at Avreth.
At the god who wrote him.
And he said:
"No."
He pressed his hand to the page.
And Avreth screamed—
—as the ink bled backward—
—and the quill snapped.
Everything went white.
And silent.
Chris awoke beneath a sky without text.
No script.
No narration.
Just wind.
She was whole.
Grey stood beside her—real, solid, smiling.
Kairo's voice echoed from the wind.
"Some stories end. Others begin again."
Chris looked at her hand.
The word "Author" was gone.
In its place:
"Reader."
And somewhere, across the void, Wale walked alone into the margins of existence—no longer a villain.
No longer a monster.
Just… a man.