The Voice in the Margin

“The story does not fear its author. Only the silence she leaves behind.”
— August Denier

We left the tavern in silence. I hated it. I wanted Ashen to say something, anything, a joke, a threat, even a sigh. Just proof that I wasn’t alone in this stillness. But the silence clung to me. It wasn’t peace; it was like being in a room where someone had just screamed. The world was holding its breath. So was I.

The sun hung in the sky, suspended between a constant state of either rising or setting. It was impossible to tell which. The trees were still, no longer swaying in the breeze. It was all like the calm before the storm.

The silence scared me more than the fog behind us. At least the fog moved. At least it did something. This stillness, this weight , it made my thoughts louder. I kept thinking about the book. About the voices. About Grinn. Were they connected?

No. They were not just connected, they were circling something. Me. I was the center I couldn't see. I told myself to stop. It didn’t help.

Walking silently in thought, I noticed a rock formation. I was sure that I had seen it before, but maybe reversed. In the bush near that formation, I found the first page. It was clear from the handwriting that I had written it, though I didn’t remember doing so.

She never said goodbye, not really. She just started closing her windows one by one, until the house forgot there had been a door.

Reading that passage filled my mind with images of books in an apartment closed off to the outside world. I didn’t remember writing that, but I knew the feeling like a scar I hadn’t touched in years. The scent of lavender hit me so vividly I almost gagged.

I pressed the page to my chest. My hands were shaking.

Who did I leave?

Who did I forget to say goodbye to?

I found the second page a few hundred meters down the trail. Like the first, it was written by my own hand. My throat tightened.

There was once a woman made entirely of sentences. One day, she grew tired of being read, so she stopped speaking. Her voice disappeared first, then her name.

I tried to speak, but for a moment, the words physically resisted me. Finally, without knowing who I was speaking for, I said, “I don’t want to disappear.”

Ashen stopped and turned to look at me. He was as surprised at what I said as I was. “Are you okay?” Ashen asked.

I opened my mouth to answer. Nothing came out. Then:
“I… no. I don’t know.”

I hated how weak it sounded. Like I was unraveling. Maybe I was.

I assured him I was fine, and we continued down the path. We reached an area that looked very much like the very first plot hole I saw. Ashen stopped. He found another page. Without reading it, he handed it to me.

Endings are small deaths. Some writers try to avoid them. They smother their characters in digressions, wrap the corpses in subplots, then pretend the silence is meaningful.

My chest seized like I’d been hit. I staggered. The spiral on my hand felt like a brand, hot, pulsing, alive. I couldn’t breathe. Not just metaphorically. Actually, it was like air had rewritten itself and forgotten to include me.

I heard the sound of a falling box and the crackle of burning paper. I looked around, and could not find the fire but I smelled smoke. I could barely hold things together. What were these words? Why did they make me feel the way I did? The fog was still following us. Was this a game it played?

The fourth page floated to me in a windless sky. I was afraid to read it, but I did anyway.

Her name was—(Ink blots here)—but she stopped answering to it. She lived in footnotes after that. Still breathing. Still watching. Still… waiting.

Those words, that name, hit me like a nail driven through the base of my skull. I fell to my knees, hands on my temples. The pages slipped from my hands.

“Lina!” Someone shouted it. I know they did.

I turned to see, but there was no one there.

I was going to throw up. Or scream. Or burn. I don’t know which. Everything tipped sideways. It was gone and everything went black.

* * *

I woke up seeing Ashen tend a fire. I was still disoriented, but I tried to set up. He came to help.

“Be careful, you have been out for several hours,” he said while helping me stabilize myself.

​​He held up the papers that I dropped, “Do you want to explain these?”

I told him everything. I explained the visions and the auditory hallucinations. I even mentioned the voice in my head that wasn’t mine and the feeling of someone else's story wanting to be told.

My voice cracked more than once. At one point I started crying and couldn’t tell if it was from fear or relief or neither.

I hated how much I needed him to believe me.

He listened without interrupting. When I was finished, he just pointed to the Scriptorium on the hill. “That makes sense. Something has led us back here.”