The First Redaction

“Every deletion is a kindness. It removes the illusion of choice.”

The world we stepped into is difficult to describe. It was a liminal space that existed as a nexus between all the parts of this world. The color of the sky was somewhere between white and a sepia overtone. If the world around Scriptorium represented continuity, this place represented chaos. By all accounts, it shouldn’t have existed, but it did.

The terrain was uncommitted. To the left, cobblestones shimmered like a noir street still waiting for its rain. A few meters ahead, the ground flattened into trench lines and smoldering bones, the aftermath of a war story that had lost its arc. Farther still, the outline of a ballroom hung in the air, swaying gently as if it remembered music. A lone wedding dress hovered mid-spin, caught in an endless pirouette.

Everywhere we looked, stories bled into one another like watercolor left in the rain. Beneath our feet, the ground cracked. Not from impact, but neglect. Thick, dark ink welled up through the fissures, pulsing like blood with no heart to pump it.

Ashen scanned the landscape with a soldier’s gaze, but even he looked small in this place. He stopped beside a rusted signpost that jutted from the ground at an awkward angle. The letters had been painted over too many times, as if even the act of naming it had become a lie.

"I thought the Hollow would feel empty," I said, voice quiet, like I might disturb something slumbering beneath the ink. "But it feels... mournful."

Ashen didn’t look at me. He knelt beside a broken sword embedded in the ground, a relic from someone’s hero’s journey that never reached its midpoint. He brushed dust from the blade with the back of his glove, as if paying silent respect.

“This is where abandoned stories wait to be forgotten,” he said.

The wind moved differently here. It carried not air, but fragments—snatches of dialogue, the scrape of a quill, the echo of a kiss that was never written. The Hollow wasn’t silent. It was unfinished. The Hollow was a place of constant construction.

Lina stirred. At first, she wasn’t a voice. I felt her trembling beneath my ribs, like a writer twitching in her sleep. When she finally spoke, her voice was soft and worn as dog-eared pages

“I brought them here,” she said. “When I didn’t know how to end them.”

I closed my eyes. I didn’t want to feel what she felt. But it leaked through anyway. I was overcome by guilt, thick and heavy, like a story you wrote just to watch it burn.

Ashen rose and joined me, his hand resting lightly on the hilt of his sword. He didn’t ask what I’d heard. He didn’t need to.

The Hollow stretched out before us. A liminal graveyard, stitched from narrative indecision. Somewhere beyond it, the Master Draft waited.

We walked, and the stories we’d failed to finish watched us go.

* * *

He kneeled where the battlefield broke into fog.

Sir Valorix’s armor was dulled by narrative erosion. His tabard was half-rendered, insignia flickering between forgotten coats of arms. He held no sword, only the shape of one, outlined in negative space, as if the tale had once drawn it but never inked it in. Around him, the land rippled, half battlefield, half fairytale garden, the genre unsure of what to call itself.

Ashen called his name first. “Valorix.”

The knight looked up. Recognition flickered in his eyes, then steadied. “Ashen.” His voice carried that old echo that was both noble and tragic like he was already rehearsing its own elegy.

He turned his gaze to me. To us. “And you. The Oracle.”

“Elyne?” Lina corrected gently. Her voice in my head was soft now. Regretful.

“I was hoping…” he continued, voice thinning like paper held to flame. “That someone would come.”

“What happened to you?” I asked. The ground under Valorix shimmered with unreconciled edits, his origin shifting with each breath. Sometimes he was a war orphan. Sometimes a knight of prophecy. Once, briefly, he flickered into a woman with a sword made of apology. Then back.

His voice still held the cadence of a story that had once mattered. “You still remember me.”

I did. We did, and somewhere in the lattice of memories I now carried, there was a field of dying suns and a knight who refused to kneel.

“I wrote you for loyalty,” Lina whispered from inside me, hollow and shaking. “A symbol of duty. But I never… I never gave you a home.”

Sir Valorix turned to face us. His eyes weren’t eyes, but rather polished hollows where reflection once lived.

“You gave me a name,” he said. “It was enough.”

He bowed. The world split.

A seam tore open behind him. Redaction seeped through like rot in a clean wound. It moved without mercy. Without malice.

A soundless, cold, and absolute pressure rolled in with it. I turned, but it was too late. From the blur stepped a silhouette in white. No face. No name. Just gloves the color of erasers and a robe stitched from remainders.

The Proofreader didn’t speak. It only moved.

Ashen raised his blade, stepped forward. “Stay behind me.”

But the figure wasn’t after us, it raised a hand toward Valorix.

“No—” I stepped forward.

Sir Valorix reached toward me, but the ink had already begun to erase.

Words unraveled from him in threads. His title went first, followed by his oaths, his memories, and his scars. One by one, sentences peeled off like brittle leaves.

Valorix looked at me, not afraid, but disappointed. “I held the line. Didn’t I?”

“You did,” I choked. “I swear you did.”

Lina surged inside me, panic laced with guilt. Do something, she screamed.

I watched his final duel unwind in reverse. I saw his name stutter, then vanish.

“I remember—” he began, then stopped.

The rest of the sentence fell to the ground like ash.

I opened the book. I wrote. Frantic lines, declarations of preservation: “He matters. He exists. This story remembers him—”

But the ink would not take. It bled through the page, useless.

“He was loyal.” I wrote, but the page stayed blank

Lina screamed. Not with rage, but with something deeper. She screamed with the grief of someone watching their world collapse and realizing they built it that way.

“I built this!” she sobbed through me. “I made this! Why can’t I undo it?”

Sir Valorix fell to one knee. Not in surrender. Not in shame. He simply ceased. His outline collapsed into silhouette, then smear, then dust. All that remained was a trace of punctuation, the curve of a comma where his voice had once paused.

Ashen stood frozen.

I knelt with tears in my eyes and closed the book. “Because it’s not your story anymore,” I whispered. “But it doesn’t mean you don’t belong in it.”

And for the first time, Lina didn’t argue.

The fog stirred. The proofreader moved on. Somewhere ahead, the page in the sky began to form showing us the way.

* * *

The wind didn’t move, but something inside me did. Where Valorix had stood, there was only a smudge, like a memory left too long in the rain. His sword, his voice, his arc, all gone.

I didn’t look away. Not this time.

Lina was sobbing through me. It was raw, jagged, and unmoored. I felt it in my chest like a second heartbeat, one trying to break out.

“I made this,” she whispered. “I made all of this.”

“I know,” I said quietly.

Ashen stood beside me, eyes downcast. He didn’t speak. He didn’t need to.

I stepped forward.

The Hollow yawned ahead, an expanse of genreless white, stretched too thin across unfinished narrative. In the far distance, The Master Draft pulsed like a heartbeat: a tower, a gate, a possibility.

“You didn’t finish the story,” I said. “That’s why the world is bleeding.”

Lina’s voice was soft now. Frayed. “I wanted to. I thought if I hurt them just enough… it would feel real. But I couldn’t end it. Not without losing myself.”

I nodded. “But I’m not here to fix it anymore.”

I looked past the debris. Past the outlines of stories left to rot. My voice didn’t shake. “I’m here to write something else.”

Lina recoiled inside me like light hitting glass. “You’ll destroy what’s left.”

“No,” I said, almost tenderly. “I’ll give it shape.”

Silence answered.Then, from deep within, her voice again, trembling, almost childlike.

“Will you remember me?”

I touched the book at my side. Its pages were no longer blank, but neither were they finished. “I don’t need to remember you,” I said. “You’re still here.”

She was quiet for a beat. “Then help me write something better,” she said softly.

“I will,” I said. “But this time, we don’t start with pain.”

Maybe Lina would no longer be a ghost. It was possible that she represented a second chance.

Behind me, Ashen finally moved. It was not to protect or to lead, just to follow. Together, we stepped forward: one body, two voices, and a story that was finally ours to tell.