The further they walked, the more the world began to glitch.
The floor beneath Auron's boots flickered with overlapping textures—stone, parchment, crystal, and once, the grainy surface of a child's notebook page. Page was constantly checking her surroundings now, not with curiosity, but with practiced tension. She knew what was coming. She could feel it in the way the environment trembled with every step Auron took.
They had crossed into a boundary few dared to name: the Fracture Point—a shifting border between coherent narrative and raw, unstable draftspace.
Everything here was unfinished.
They passed scenes that ended mid-thought. Dialogue bubbles hung in the air with no speakers. Mountains floated upside down. The sky overhead was a warped tapestry stitched from dozens of genres: high fantasy moons, sci-fi satellites, even the blood-red sun of horror realms. No two patches matched.
"How close are we?" Auron asked.
Page hesitated. "Closer than logic will tolerate."
He raised an eyebrow.
She explained. "The Scriptcore isn't hidden behind distance. It's hidden behind belief. We have to un-think our way into it. The more we know, the harder it is to reach."
"Then ignorance is our weapon?"
"More like intuition. But there's a problem."
"Always is."
She didn't smile. "You're starting to remember too much. That might keep us out."
Auron stopped.
He looked up. The sky above had stilled. A quiet pulse was spreading from somewhere beyond the jagged hills of contradiction. A rhythm. Almost like a heartbeat.
"Something's calling me."
Page paled. "Then we're out of time."
They crested a ridge of malformed tropes and stared down at what looked like a ruined library, sunken halfway into the void.
Auron could tell it wasn't real.
The shadows bent wrong. The staircases led back to themselves. The books screamed silently when you looked too closely. But the heartbeat was coming from inside.
"That's not the Scriptcore," he said.
Page nodded. "It's worse. It's a Trapline. A place built to simulate the Core and imprison anyone who gets too close."
He turned. "So what now?"
"We go through it. There's no other path. The only way to reach the Core is to trigger the system's response. Force it to overextend."
"You mean… provoke it?"
"We've been walking its perimeter long enough. It's time to see what it sends when it stops trying to erase you… and starts trying to overwrite you."
They entered the ruined library.
Immediately, Auron felt pressure—like the weight of unfinished books collapsing onto his spine. Sentences crawled over the floor like worms. He stepped around them carefully. Each word carried emotional charge.
Betrayal
Regret
Always
Forgotten
His Quill burned in his pocket.
Page didn't speak. She couldn't. The moment they passed through the entry arch, her voice had been stolen by an old command woven into the walls: "No echoes shall pass."
They moved together, silent. Auron noticed that the floorplan kept changing. Doors disappeared behind them. Shelves rearranged themselves.
And then, without warning, he was alone.
He turned—Page was gone.
The books hissed.
And one stepped off the shelf.
It wasn't a book, not really. It had the shape of a man, but its body was made entirely of narrative segments, chapters layered over each other like scales.
Its face was covered in a torn title page. On its chest: a synopsis crossed out in red.
"Main Character – REJECTED DRAFT."
It raised a hand made of shredded paper. From it extended a pen—sharp, rusted, screaming.
Auron reached for his Quill.
But it didn't respond.
The creature struck.
Auron ducked. Rolled. Came up behind a crumbling thesaurus and kicked it toward the thing. It shattered into a cloud of forgotten definitions.
The creature wasn't slowed.
"YOU TOOK MY PLACE."
Its voice was a dozen tones at once. Men. Women. Children. All the voices that never got written.
It lunged again. This time, Auron let it come.
At the last moment, he turned and wrote in the air with sheer will:
"The Quill burns with remembered ink."
It ignited.
His weapon lit like a star, and he slashed downward.
The creature shrieked, breaking apart into fragments that dissolved into sentences:
"What if I had mattered…"
"He was never supposed to—"
"Please remember me…"
They faded.
Auron stood alone.
Then he heard a sound.
Breathing.
Page stumbled through a door that hadn't existed a second ago. She fell into him, shaking.
"They… they showed me every version of myself that got scrapped," she whispered. "I was a side character. A villain. A plot device. In one world, I was a punctuation error."
He held her steady.
"But in none of them," she said, "did I ever fight back."
He looked toward the core of the ruined library.
"It's not a trap," he said. "It's a test."
Page nodded. "Then let's pass it."
They reached the center of the structure.
There, hanging in the air, was a word.
Not printed. Not spoken.
Just floating.
Auron stepped closer.
As he did, letters formed around the word. A title.
"Auron – The Final Rewrite"
He froze.
The word changed.
"Auron – Redacted"
Then again.
"Auron – Forgotten Name"
Page whispered beside him. "It's responding to you. The system doesn't know what to call you anymore. You've destabilized your own category."
Then a new voice spoke.
Not Page.
Not the Narrator.
Something older.
"One more step, and you'll be unclassified. Are you prepared to exist without any arc?"
The floor cracked beneath them. Black lines spread like fractures in a stained-glass window.
Page turned. "We have to leave—"
"No," Auron said. "We go forward."
He reached for the word.
The room exploded in light.
When vision returned, they stood in a white void.
In front of them: a single doorway.
No label. No lock. Just waiting.
Page stepped beside him. "This isn't the Core."
"No," Auron said. "But it's the road to it."
He looked down at the Quill.
It was glowing steadily now.
For the first time, not flickering.
"I remember more than I did," he said. "Not enough. But more."
Page smiled faintly.
He reached for the doorknob.
And opened it.
The white void shattered.
They walked into shadow.
Together.