The Rewrite Storm

“The wind does not ask if you are ready before it tears down your house. So too does the edit.”

The Proofreaders advanced without hurry, their pale gloves unsullied by the dust that clung to everyone else. The townsfolk scattered, pulling children into doorways, shuttering windows. No one screamed. They knew better than to give the censors a sound to follow.

Lina’s voice pressed at the edges of my mind, sharp and urgent. “Open the book. Just a line, freeze them, change their orders, make them see us as harmless.”

The weight of the book at my hip felt heavier than iron. My hand twitched toward it, but I stopped. “No.”

“They’ll purge this entire street!”

“They’ll do worse if I use it,” I whispered, watching the Proofreaders pause to examine a cracked signboard, their fingers tracing the painted letters as though the words themselves were guilty. “The moment I start rewriting, I’ve decided whose story matters more. I’m not here to fix this place.”

“You’re here to survive,” Lina shot back.

“Exactly. And survival means knowing where not to write.”

* * *

The Proofreaders moved on, the air they left behind colder, thinner. Somewhere beyond the walls, thunder rolled, but it wasn’t a storm that belonged to the sky.

The Proofreaders left without looking back. Their absence didn’t feel like safety, only a pause in the inevitable.

“You have to go,” the historian said, voice low but urgent. He’d been waiting for us in the doorway of the archives, a satchel already over his shoulder. “They’ll be back, but not to talk. The town will be… reset.”

Ashen frowned. “Reset?”

“Memories removed, contradictions erased, faces rewritten. If you’re still here when it happens, you’ll be part of the edit.”

I glanced at Lina’s reflection in the shop window — my reflection, really — but she didn’t speak. Just watched.

The historian pressed a folded scrap into my hand, a rough map scrawled in uneven ink. “Take the old stone causeway. It predates this settlement. It’ll skirt the Hollow and bring you closer to the center. Maybe even to your Master Draft.”

We left without ceremony. The town’s narrow streets bled into open fields, the last clustered roofs leaning toward each other like they knew they’d soon be unmade.

The causeway stretched across the plain like an abandoned spine, its stones uneven and worn, holding firm against a landscape that refused to decide what it was. To the left, the ground shimmered between marsh and cracked desert. To the right, it briefly became the edge of a cobbled street before collapsing back into gray soil. The air carried the damp scent of rain that never fell, sharpened with a faint crackle like distant lightning.

Somewhere along the road, the air began to change. The colors bled of their richness; sound thinned, as if wrapped in damp cloth. A scrap of torn text fluttered past my shoulder — half a sentence, no period.

Above us, the sky had gone pale, bleached as though the color had been drained from it. Wisps of something light and brittle drifted down like ash or frost, breaking apart before they touched the earth.

Ashen’s voice came low, measured. “Old soldiers talked about storms that change the land while you’re standing on it. You’d fall asleep in a trench and wake in a ballroom. They called them Rewrite Storms.”

I glanced at him. “And you believed them?”

He didn’t smile. “Didn’t have to. I saw men vanish mid-march. The ground swallows more than bones.”

Lina stirred inside me. Not as a whisper this time. She was closer, sharper, the way an instinct feels before you can name it. “He’s right. These storms don’t shift, they devour. And they never give back what they take.”

Something wavered ahead. At first I thought it was a tree, but it flickered—an old willow, then a scaffold, then a rusted tower with antennae bent in the wind.

I looked down. Our footprints were gone almost before we made them, replaced by new ones facing the opposite direction, as if someone was walking toward us with our gait.

A crow landed on a rock further along, its feathers unsettled in the flat light. It tilted its head once, then its shadow twisted, lengthening into something with bars like a cage, before snapping back. The bird cawed and flew off.

“It’s starting,” I said.

“Not yet,” Lina warned. “But soon. And when it comes, we’ll have no say in where we land.”

Ashen’s hand brushed the hilt of his sword, though both of us knew steel wouldn’t matter. The air pressed closer. It felt like standing at the edge of thunder.

I looked up. The horizon itself had begun to ripple.

* * *

The world cracked without warning. It wasn’t the sound of a thunder storm, but something deeper, like a seam tearing through stone. The sound rolled across the plain, low and endless, and the air around us shivered.

The causeway fractured beneath our feet. For one heartbeat it was marble, polished and cold, then a scar of battlefield earth, then again a ballroom floor gleaming faintly as if waiting for dancers who would never come. Each step tried to anchor itself in a different world.

Ashen started to speak. “We need to…” But his words broke mid-sentence, replaced with a stranger’s cadence, crisp and commanding: “The king will not grant you audience.” He froze, startled at his own mouth.

I heard my own voice betray me, too. An alien phrase half-formed in my mouth before I clamped it shut. A line stolen from somewhere else. Someone else.

The horizon bent. A tavern appeared in the distance, its lanterns glowing, laughter spilling through its swinging door. But when we took a step toward it, the tavern warped into a watchtower under siege, flaming arrows streaking overhead. Another step, and it collapsed into the shape of a half-built bridge dangling over black emptiness.

Figures erupted around us in flickers: a priest lifting a trembling hand of blessing; a child offering me a flower that turned to ash before I could touch it; a knife pressed to Ashen’s throat by a man who vanished before the steel could draw blood. Nothing stayed. Nothing held.

Then came the collapse. A steeple, born of the watchtower, or maybe the bridge, tipped and thundered down. It had not existed a breath ago, yet now its weight was merciless.

Ashen was caught beneath it, driven to the fractured ground, his sword lost in the chaos. He strained against the rubble, muscles straining, but it was too much. “Keep moving!” he shouted, voice ragged, a soldier’s instinct overriding his own fear.

I lunged toward him, but the ground betrayed me. Each step dissolved: cobblestones became ballroom tiles, which slid into mud, which shifted into waist-deep water. Ashen was always there, always just ahead, but unreachable. like a mirage painted across the seams of broken worlds.

The book at my side throbbed, alive with possibility. I knew what it wanted. I knew what Lina wanted.

And then she moved.

My hands clenched without me. My breath caught, not mine. My body stiffened and then obeyed someone else’s command. Lina. She pushed through me with raw desperation, her presence no longer a whisper in my chest but a hand seizing the quill, the page, the flesh.

“No—” I gasped, but the word belonged to both of us.

She forced my arms forward. The broken steeple groaned, stuttered, and rewove itself, not into stone, but scaffolding. Fragile wood splintered and scattered, harmless.

Ashen tore himself free, coughing dust, his face pale but alive. He found his sword and dragged himself to his feet.

I staggered, trembling, feeling the echo of her control like shackles still clamped around my wrists. I took back control with a sharp and sudden gasp, as if surfacing from drowning. My body was mine again, but I had felt how easily she could take me. How easily she could decide.

And for the first time since the Hollow, I was afraid of the voice inside me.

* * *

The last of the scaffolding collapsed in harmless splinters, dust settling over Ashen as he pulled himself upright. Relief washed through me, but it was short lived.

A voice, thin and broken, rose from the chaos. “Father…”

We turned to see a figure knealing in the ruin, its form stuttering like a candle flame. It was a girl, no older than twelve, her dark hair partially covering her face that was a blur of outlines that never sharpened. She sobbed, reaching for Ashen with hands that dissolved into static before they could touch him.

Ashen froze. His sword slipped from his grip, clattering against the uneven ground. He looked not at her, but at me. His expression was not gratitude for survival, but something colder, something like dread.

The girl’s mouth opened again, but only static poured out. Then she vanished, as if the storm had swallowed her back into its hunger.

I wrenched control of myself back with a snarl. My muscles burned with the violation of it. “What did you do?” My voice shook with fury, with fear. “You tore her out of someone else’s story!”

Lina’s voice echoed through me, sharp now, no longer apologetic. “I saved him. You would have let him die.”

“You call that saving?” I spat. “That wasn’t mercy. That was theft.”

“You don’t understand.” Her words pressed harder, driven by urgency. “You want to walk inside the lines while the lines are already burning. Survival doesn’t wait for purity. Sometimes you take what you can, where you can.”

I closed my eyes, trembling. “That’s not survival. That’s playing god.”

Ashen stood between us, silent. He didn’t defend me. He didn’t defend her. He only watched the empty space where the girl had been, jaw tight, eyes unreadable. His silence was worse than anger.

The storm ebbed at last. The sky peeled open in ragged strips, revealing fragments of a calmer world beyond. The causeway lay ahead, but it was wrong somehow. It was shorter than before, missing the landmarks I remembered. The plains around us were unfamiliar, as if part of the road had been rewritten while no one was looking.

Something fluttered down from above. I reached out and caught it. A page, rough-edged, written in my own hand. My words. My voice. They told of things I had not yet lived.

I folded the page carefully, hiding it from Ashen’s eyes, from Lina’s, even though she must have felt the weight of it.

“We need to reach the Master Draft,” I muttered, pocketing the fragment. “Before the whole world looks like this.”

Silence stretched between us. Then, quiet, almost tender, Lina whispered from deep within me:
“Or before there’s nothing left worth rewriting.”