The Broken Scribe

“A name means nothing unless someone is listening.” — August Denier

We walked in silence for what seemed to be hours, or maybe it was just the space between one thought and another. It was difficult to tell in this world. As far as I could tell, there was no true concept of time in this world. Everything about this world was strange, but at the same time very familiar. It was surreal, like walking through a dream someone else abandoned.

The land under my feet did not follow any pattern I could trust. In any given stretch, the ground randomly switched between cobblestone roads, patches of grass, simple cracked earth, and what I could only describe as blank parchment that curled at its edges as if shrinking from me.

Quill-shaped trees leaned over the trail like punctuation marks, their ink-black leaves drifting down with no wind to carry them. In the distance, I saw a house with no door. There was a road that looped back onto itself. The sky flickered, like someone forgot what time it was supposed to be. The world felt wrong. It wasn’t exactly hostile, just incomplete.

Ashen walked ahead, saying nothing. He didn’t look back. He walked like someone who had stopped hoping things made sense long ago. I kept my distance. I didn’t want to ask where we were because I was afraid he’d tell me. Still, beneath the fear, something stranger stirred, a sense that I’d seen this all before.

I would later find out that this realm was called Draftlands. It was not a cohesive realm, but made up of a patchwork of discarded genres, failed metaphors, and overwritten tone shifts. It felt like someone had written ten different stories on the same page and had given up halfway through each.

Navigating through these lands was difficult, to say the least. We were passing through the mountains that lay beyond the first ridge when I nearly stepped right into my first plot hole. It was a circular void with smooth edges and a color darker than a shadow. I stared into the absence and felt it drawing me in. The surrounding edges blurred like a page being smudged by careless fingers.

Ashen grabbed my shoulder, pulling me back into the present. “Don’t stare,” he said, finally breaking the silence. “They notice when you do.”

I stepped back and caught my breath. “What is it?”

“A hole where something used to be. Maybe a scene, a person, or a purpose"

“And now?”

“Now it is nothing, but it still remembers.”

I didn’t know what that meant, but it made my chest ache. I didn’t ask about it any further. Instead, I whispered to myself, “I didn’t mean to leave you like this.” I wasn’t sure why I said that. It just felt like I should.

Exhaustion consumed me. The running, the walking, the book, all this was too much for me to handle. I sat down on a rock trying to catch my breath and rest. I told him I was too tired to keep walking, but the way he looked at me made me feel small, like maybe I was just being childish. Ashen mumbled something under his breath and then picked me up, put me on his back, and we continued our journey.

We walked in silence again. My hero didn’t talk much, and I couldn’t find the right words either. Words did not come easily to me. When they did, they often felt foreign, as if they were being written by someone else.

We continued walking, or rather he continued walking. I was riding on his back, feeling embarrassed that I could not handle it myself. I hated how small it made me feel to be carried like something broken. But worse was knowing he was right.

We walked past a table in the middle of a dry creek bed completely set for dinner with food and candles. I wondered who lived here. Ashen explained that no one did, not really. He told me that maybe someone had lived there once before someone cut the scene. He said that characters that didn’t test well or don’t fit the tone get removed.

“This world’s full of ghosts like that. Half-real. Half-gone,” Ashen said with a hint of sadness in his voice.

I was told the place where he found me was called the Scriptorium. It was a place where old scribes used to live. They were oracles and record-keepers. Most of them disappeared long ago, overwritten or erased like the rest. He told me the fog we ran from was called the rewrite fog. It creeps in slowly and changes or erases everything in its path. You barely notice it, until it starts to change you. Then it is too late to do anything.

As the sun began to go low on the horizon for the fourth time in our journey, Ashen put me down. He pointed toward a tower in the distance and said we’d spend the night there.

* * *

The crooked tower looked like it had been sketched into the world and then forgotten. It was complete in some areas, and only half-formed in others. Its staircase spiraled upward into the open air, vanishing into fog like it had once led somewhere important.

Ashen pushed open the crooked door. It creaked like something trying to remember how to speak.

Inside, the floor was covered in scrolls and quills, left broken and brittle with time. A broken mirror leaned against one wall, cracked down the middle. I saw my reflection for the first time in this world. A pale girl in scorched robes, smudged with ash and ink, stared back at me. Her eyes were wide and too quiet.

I didn’t recognize her.

Ashen sat against the far wall, folding his arms. He didn’t ask how I felt. Maybe he already knew. Maybe he didn’t care.

“This place was part of a quest once,” he said. “Intro to a prophecy arc. Never got written.”

I knelt beside a toppled inkpot, my fingers tracing a stain on the floor that might have been blood.

“Was I… part of that?” I asked.

Ashen didn’t answer right away. He stared at me like he was choosing the least cruel version of the truth.

“You were a placeholder,” he said with a sigh. “A supporting role. Oracle-type. You had a name, a trait, maybe three lines of dialogue if they’d ever gotten that far.”

“And then?”

“Then nothing. The scene never happened. The arc got shelved, but for some reason you remained.”

The silence that followed wasn’t empty. It was dense. It felt like the world was holding its breath again.

I sat back on my heels, looking at my hands. Ink still stained my fingertips.

“So I was meant to… to appear once. Speak. Then disappear?”

Ashen nodded. “You weren’t supposed to have thoughts. Or questions. Or a voice.”

My mouth was dry.

“Then what am I now?”

He looked at me for a long time. Not with pity, but with something colder. He looked at me like he recognized me for what I truly was.

“A mistake the Rewrite hasn’t caught yet, ” he answered in a tone that was detached from any emotion.

I stood slowly, not sure how to process what he just told me. I moved back towards the broken mirror. My reflection followed in pieces.

I felt a burning pulse in the palm of my hand. The pain was sharp, but familiar. I opened my hand and saw the ink spiral that was etched in my skin shimmer faintly.

There was a flicker of light in the mirror. For a split second, I saw someone else, not Elyne, not this pale shadow, but a different woman. I saw an older woman with sad eyes and glasses sitting at a desk. As quickly as it came, it was gone. My pale reflection is all that remained.

I gasped and stood there in silence, staring at the mirror. I was trying to shake the feeling that I had seen myself, not as I am, but as I was or will be.

Ashen rushed to my side. “What did you see?” he asked with a hint of desperation.

“I don’t know,” I whispered. “But it felt like… me.”

He reached for my hand, tracing the spiral scar with his finger. The ink shimmered, then bled into words I hadn’t written:

“You will fall into silence. But the silence will speak back.”

Ashen flinched and stepped back, as if burned. “That line was never written.”

“I think I was supposed to say it.”

The sound of a bell tolling in the distance broke the moment. The metallic sound came low across the landscape, carrying with it a sense of finality.

Ashen’s expression changed instantly from one of fascination and wonder to one of grave concern. “That’s a Proofreader bell,” he said. “They’ve found you.”

I looked at him puzzled. “What do they want?”

“To fix the narrative,” he said. “Starting with you.”