The Spiral Path

“History is nothing more than the ash left behind by revision.” — August Denier

We made camp on the side of the trail, say little to each other. His quietness was beginning to get to me. Why didn’t he speak to me? Was he afraid of me, or afraid of what I represented? I am not sure if I will ever find those answers.

After a dinner consisting of stale bread and dried meat, I made a bed near the fire. I laid there thinking about Lina. I now had a name for that voice in my head that haunted me like a bad memory.

The nightmare began with the click-clack of unseen keys echoing through a library of untitled books. It was a place with no people, just aisles of unfinished thoughts, bound and waiting. I took a book off the shelf and began reading it. The narration wasn’t mine, it was hers.

“All stories end in silence. Only the weak beg for echoes.”

I slammed the book shut and dropped it on the floor. Fear was overcoming me, but I couldn’t move. I tried to run, but my legs didn’t work. I smelled the overcoming scent of smoke and felt the heat of the fire touch me.

I sat up straight. My heart was pounding, and I could not catch my breath. The wind was calm and smoke from the smoldering fire hung low to the ground. All of it contained by a wall of fog.

The fog had learned patience.

I stood at the edge of camp, boots sinking into damp earth. The fog had surrounded us in the night. There was no wind, no warning. Just silence thick enough to choke on. The world had gone still. It was not like dawn, but like a breath held too long. The Rewrite wasn’t chasing now. It was waiting.

“You should run," her voice echoed in my head uninvited.

“I can’t. There is nowhere to go,” I replied.

"Then maybe you should have never written us here."

I clenched my fists. “I didn’t…”

“Didn’t finish. Didn’t stay. That’s always your out, abandonment in the shape of a period.”

I wasn’t going to have this discussion now, especially not with her. I turned to look at Ashen. He was already awake, crouched by the dying fire, staring at the fog like it had spoken to him. It was urging us to take the path it generously provided us.

“It’s herding us,” I said.

He nodded once. “That or waiting to see if you’ll herd yourself.”

I scanned the trees through the fog. They weren't trees anymore, not exactly. Their edges flickered, their roots blurring into sentences half-formed. The landscape was changing. The scar on my palm began to throb again, either reminding me or warning me of something.

Then came the voice again. "You always walked away before the ending."

I flinched like I had been slapped. It was Lina’s voice again. It was a voice sharpened by guilt and regret. It was more than a memory.

“No. No, you’re dead. You’re not real.”

"I’m what’s left when you abandon something. I’m the part of you that still wants to matter."

Ashen stood and looked at me with growing concern. “You hear her again.”

“She’s not going away,” I replied. “I can hear her. Not just memories. She talks like she’s still alive.”

“Maybe she is,” Ashen quietly replied.

“Don’t be poetic,” I whispered like I was begging him to see me. “I’m losing my mind.”

“No. You're remembering it.” he countered. “She probably will not go away anytime soon. Not until you listen.”

We packed up camp in silence, and headed down the path to the Scriptorium on the hill. Every step toward the hill tightened something in my chest. As we climbed the path, the fog filled in behind us reminding us that there was only one path to take.

* * *

As we walked the winding path up the hill, Lina would not stop talking. She was like a toddler that just learned to speak. She loved hearing the sound of her own voice, even though it was only in my head. I was trying to ignore her.

"Left foot, then right. That’s all we ever were. Movement without meaning."

Shut up.

"If I’m just a memory, why do you flinch when I speak?"

The worst thing was she was right. She was more than an unwanted memory. She was part of me. Part of me that I was not sure I wanted to know. What I knew for sure is that we were connected beyond being the voice in my head.

* * *

The Scriptorium had changed. Where once the structure loomed like a cathedral to forgotten words, now it sagged inward, the roof sheared away like it had been rejected mid-sentence. Great stones lay half-sunken in the dirt, and broken beams jutted from the earth like the ribs of a long-buried beast.

We stepped inside. Burned pages still floated down like snow or falling ash after a fire.

Ashen said nothing, but I could see that his jaw tensed as he crossed the threshold. I noticed how he scanned the walls–not with the caution of a warrior, but the reverence of someone returning to a sacred place they had no right to re-enter.

Fragmentary is the best way I could describe the world inside. The air was thick with drifting pages, most blank, but some whispered in ink as they passed. It was mostly unformed scenes and murmurings in half-spoken sentences. One page clung to my arm briefly before slipping away: it read, “The girl who tried to matter.”

”This place is dead,” I whispered. “Or dreaming. Or both.”

Ashen glanced back at me, but said nothing. We continued descending a cracked and broken stairwell. I clung to the wall, watching every step as I went. The stairs descended into a void, but the bottom slowly solidified as we descended. The walls rippled and flickered. Sometimes they were made of smooth stone, and other times they were lined with shelves. Sentences formed across the brick only to erase themselves as I looked at them.

In the center of the floor below, surrounded by a ring of scorched stone, sat the burned index. It was a pit. A ruin of blackened manuscripts, shattered ink bottlers, warped spine bindings, and ash so fine that it floated like mist when disturbed. Names had been carved into the stone wall in a slow spiral. Many were scratched out. Others glowed faintly.

One scratched out name caught my eye: Eline. Below it: Eilynn. Then: E.___ And finally: Unwritten.

I stepped closer. A burnt page drifted into my hand. My name was scrawled across it. It wasn’t Elyne, but Elaine, crossed out three times , then scribbled over with a single note: “Not enough spine.”

I nearly dropped it. The book at my side pulsed faintly, like a vein tapped by memory.as Lina had stirred.

”I remember you now,” she deadpanned. “you were supposed to inspire him. That was your job. You didn’t.”

“you erased me,” I mumbled quietly.

“I revised you. That is what authors do.”

”You killed me for convenience,” I countered, pulling a sharp breath through my teeth.

Anger swelled inside me. The words stung in the scar on my palm. Immediately, as if connected, the walls in front of me changed. Text scrawled across it like ink crawling across wet parchment, manifesting a scene. It was me standing at the edge of a cliff, sword drawn, blood soaking my clothes. A crowd behind me was cheering for a martyr’s death and a hero’s ending.

Then as quickly as it formed, it vanished.

Ashen turned to me stunned by what he witnessed. “Did you… do that?”

I replied with a shaken voice. “I didn’t mean to.”

”But you can,” Lina interjected. She always had to get the last word.

Further down the hall of dissolving scenes. Ashen paused. In front of us a mural had appeared. It was painted in soft tones and impressionistic brushstrokes. The mural showed a picnic. A woman with short black hair and glasses leaned against a man in gray armor, laughing, her hand on his shoulder. Her face was unmistakingly Lina’s.

”I know her. I don’t know why… but I remember this,” Ashen said with a distant expression like he didn’t expect anyone to hear it.

My stomach sank. “You were written for her,” I said. it wasn’t a question.

”Maybe. Maybe I waited too long to find out,” he said. After a brief pause, he added, “Maybe that is why I never left.”

We stood there in silence. The dust stirred, and the pages stopped fluttering. The silence was broken by a voice that whispered from the darkness. “you walk on footnotes and call them destiny.”

I turned sharply as a future emerged near the edge of a collapsed rotunda. It was the unmistakable shape of the Draftkeeper wearing a cloak stitched together from discarded drafts and quills sewn into a hooded shroud.

Trying to be brave, I simply sighed, “Oh. It is you again.”

“Of course. When stories get scared, when endings rot before they arrive, or when memory is allowed to mold, I am there to put it together again.”

Ashen, without hesitation, stepped protectively in front of me, hand on the hilt of his blade.

The figure did not approach. Instead, he continued his monologue like a master villain telling the hero his plan. “You were not ever meant to be here. The final revision approaches. The Master Draft Wakes, and when it does…” He flickered like a glitch in an overwritten frame. “…you will not get a second ending.”

”Then what am I supposed to do?” I cried with a voice showing more fear than I had wanted to.

“Write, girl. Write something worth surviving before someone writes you out again.” With that, he vanished like a redacted paragraph.

We stood there alone. The ashes of the Burned Index still shifted underfoot. The glowing names on the wall dimmed, as if the building itself had heard the warning.

I slowly turned to face Ashen. With a hoarse and cracked voice I cried, “I don’t want to be erased.” Tears fell from my eyes. I could no longer contain them.

He put his hand on my shoulder. “Then don’t be.”

On instinct, I took out Denier’s book. It opened by itself. A sentence appeared on the first blank page: "I am the girl who refused to disappear.”