The Genre Frontiers

“Every world must believe it is the only one. Doubt is a slow poison; certainty is the marrow that holds the bones of a story together.”
— August Denier, On the Anatomy of Fiction

We crossed the threshold beneath an arch of stone so weathered it looked like it might sigh and collapse. The Hollow was gone the instant we stepped through. One heartbeat we stood in the bleeding chaos, the next we were swallowed by a sky so blue it felt deliberate.

The city before us was whole. Not patched, not bleeding into other places, but complete in a way I hadn’t seen since this journey began. Its walls were high and pale, crowned with banners that snapped in the wind, each one stitched with a crest of sun and quill. Inside, the streets wound in graceful arcs, cobblestones glinting with the sheen of morning rain.

The air was warmer here. It smelled of baking bread, parchment freshly inked, and steel tempered in the forge. People moved with purpose, their steps unhurried but sure. They spoke in the same clipped cadence, dressed in the same narrow palette of cream, blue, and gold, as though they had all agreed on the scene’s color scheme long ago.

Ashen slowed beside me, his eyes scanning the streets like he was trying to catch the seams in the backdrop. “Feels… real,” he murmured.

“It is real,” I said. “But not complete.”

From inside, Lina stirred. Her voice was cool, appraising. “It’s well-built. But thin. You can feel where the walls end if you press hard enough.”

I kept walking, ignoring her, but she pressed on. “A few changes, one line here, another there and it could be more than it is.”

A merchant passing with a tray of apples glanced at us, then away, the way you look at strangers who haven’t learned the rules yet.

In the market square, the noise softened into something almost polite. A fountain trickled in the center, its water catching the light like glass. Overhead, swallows darted between rooftops, never straying beyond the city wall. The people here lived as if nothing outside those walls could touch them.

I caught a fragment of conversation between two stall keepers:
“…circle of the world ends at the harbor… always has.”
“…Master Draft—hah! A child’s tale. Everyone knows the Scribes write the sky each morning.”

Ashen shot me a look. I didn’t answer. We kept moving, deeper into the fiction.

* * *

We found the historian in a narrow hall that smelled of dust and oil lamps. The walls were hung with tapestries depicting the city’s founding. Each stitch a declaration of certainty. A thousand years ago, the First Scribe had laid these streets. The harbor was the edge of the world. Beyond it, only mist.

The man who greeted us was tall and spare, his robes the deep blue of ink before it dries. His eyes were sharp, but not unkind.

“You are not of here,” he said without preamble.

“No,” I answered. “We’re passing through.”

His mouth twitched in a smile that wasn’t quite a smile. “There is no ‘through.’ The city is all there is.”

Lina shifted inside me. I felt her lean forward, like she might step through my skin. “Ask him about the Master Draft.”

I ignored her. “And the Hollow?” I asked instead.

At this, his smile faltered. “We do not speak of… the Unbound places. They are not real.” He hesitated. “They are inconsistencies. They weaken the spine of our story.”

“Inconsistencies?” Ashen asked.

The historian nodded. “They are what happens when the Scribes lose the thread. Scenes that lead nowhere. Names that change between one chapter and the next. Those who stray too far return… altered.”

He moved closer, lowering his voice. “The Proofreaders come when the rot spreads too far. They remove what does not belong. Not just the moment, but the memory of it. When they are done, there is nothing left to miss.”

Lina’s presence pressed harder now, her voice curling around my thoughts. “If we fixed the inconsistencies, the Proofreaders wouldn’t come. I could make this place better.”

“Not our place,” I thought back.

“If you cared about it, you’d try.”

I pushed her down, but the words lodged like grit under my skin.

The historian insisted on showing us his city.

“It is easier to believe in what you can touch,” he said, leading us through streets that seemed too solid to doubt. The buildings leaned together as if conspiring; balconies spilled over with flowers in impossible colors. Every brick looked deliberate, as if someone had written it into being with care.

He greeted shopkeepers by name, told us which stones in the market square were original, which had been “revised” after the fire fifty years ago. He said “revised” the way one might say “blessed.”

On a narrow side street, we came across a knot of children chalking shapes on the wall of an alley. The historian’s voice softened. “The dreaming game,” he explained. “They draw a doorway, then tell each other what’s on the other side. It is… how new stories begin.”

One girl, her hands dusted with blue chalk, turned to us. “I dreamed there was an ocean past the harbor. Big enough that you couldn’t see the other side.”

“That’s not possible,” a boy shot back. “The harbor is the edge of the world.”

“Only because you’ve never been past it,” she said, defiant.

The historian’s jaw tightened. “They are only children. It is best not to fill their heads with things that can’t be.”

Inside, Lina stirred. “You could make it true for them. Just a line in the book, and the sea would be there.”

I kept walking. “Not our place,” I muttered.

“It could be,” she said.

We turned onto the main boulevard, and the air felt thinner. Conversations faltered. The market’s bright colors dulled to washed-out sepia. The shadows lengthened, even though the sun hadn’t moved.

The historian stopped mid-sentence. His eyes locked on something down the street. “No…” he whispered.

At first, I thought it was a trick of the light, the heat shimmer over cobblestones. But the distortion moved with purpose. Lines in the world seemed to straighten where it passed, as if reality were being forced back into alignment.

The Proofreader stepped into view, tall and severe, its robe a crisp white that refused the city’s palette. Pages of blank parchment swirled in its wake, brushing against market stalls, walls, people, leaving pale smears where color and detail used to be.

The girl with the chalk screamed when her doorway faded to nothing, her hand still mid-line.

The historian’s voice shook. “Run.”

Ashen’s hand went to his sword. Mine went to the book.

Inside me, Lina’s voice surged hot and urgent. “One line, Elyne. Just one line, and I can keep this place.”

And for a moment, I almost said yes.

* * *

The Proofreader’s gaze swept over the street, though it had no eyes. Its hands moved with mechanical grace, plucking threads from the air and winding them into its parchment. Wherever the threads were drawn, something vanished.

A shopkeeper mid-shout froze, his words unraveling from the end backward. The awning above him lost its color, then its seams, then its weight, crumpling into a blank sheet before folding into the Proofreader’s ledger.

I felt Lina coil inside me like a spring. “Do it now. One stroke. Bring the sea. Give them something worth keeping.”

The chalk girl was still clutching her dream-doorway, but the wall beneath her hand was already pale and featureless. She looked at me, not with the awe people give an oracle, but the naked desperation of someone who still believes the world might be saved.

I wanted to. Saints, I wanted to.

Ashen’s voice cut through, low and steady. “If you change this, you’ll own it. All of it. Every life here. Every end.”

The Proofreader turned its faceless head toward us, parchment hands twitching.

I opened the book. My pen hovered.

“Please,” Lina whispered. It wasn’t a command this time. It was a plea.

I closed the book.

“No,” I said.

The air trembled. The Proofreader lunged forward, parchment fluttering like a thousand wings. Ashen stepped to meet it, steel clashing against a soundless strike. I drew the book again, not to rewrite the city, but to pull a curtain over us, inky and absolute.

The world blinked. We were in an alley two streets over, the sound of the marketplace gone. Only the girl’s chalk lay at my feet, broken in half.

Inside me, Lina was silent, but it wasn’t surrender. It was the sound of someone taking in the measure of your resolve.

Ashen exhaled slowly, scanning the empty street. “They’ll keep coming.”

I nodded, staring at the chalk in my hand. “Then so will we.”

In the distance, the Proofreader’s white robe still moved through the city, erasing everything it touched. But beyond the rooftops, past the harbor, I thought I saw the shimmer of water. Whether it was real or only imagined, I didn’t know. I didn’t write it there.

Not yet.