The Rift

“Correction is the cruelest illusion. To believe a life can be
fixed by erasing its flaws is to deny it ever truly lived.”

The raven crossed overhead for the third time, its shadow stuttering across the cobbles like a skipped line in a broken script. My chest tightened. Roads don’t fold like this unless something is bending them. Ashen slowed beside me, hand near his sword, but it wasn’t fatigue or chance leading us in circles. It was design.

Ashen’s eyes flicked toward the sky. “That’s the third time.”

I didn’t answer. My grip on the book had already tightened, the skin of my knuckles straining pale.

Inside me, Lina pressed forward, her voice cold and certain. “You could have saved him. The Wanderer didn’t have to end like that. You let him go.”

“I let him be free,” I said aloud, though the words tasted bitter in my mouth. “He chose his own ending.”

“No,” she hissed. “You chose for him. You chose not to act.”

I clenched my jaw, forcing her back down into silence, though her anger rippled through my ribs like a second heartbeat. Ashen said nothing, but I felt his glance linger too long, wary, as though he could sense the fracture running inside me.

We came to a crossroads. Three roads stretched outward, indistinguishable but for the leaning signpost at their center. We chose the middle path, but after a few minutes of walking, we ended back up in the same clearing. Confused, we took the path again only to end up right back where we started. This couldn’t be the same split in the road.

“We walked ten minutes,” Ashen muttered, staring at the signpost. “But the air hasn’t changed. Even the dirt hasn’t shifted. This isn’t a road, it’s a trick.”

Confused, I marked the split with my hand against the wood and continued down the path. But after ten minutes of walking, we stepped into the same clearing again. Same paths. Same leaning signpost. My handprint was already there, pressed dark into the grain.

A chill crawled through my spine.

“This isn’t a circle,” I whispered. “It’s a snare.”

Ashen’s hand went to his sword. “Proofreaders.”

The raven cried again, the sound sharp enough to cut through to the soul. The air rippled as if struck by invisible hands, and the ground lurched beneath us. The ground beneath us shifted in a sudden jolt that nearly brought me to my knees. The road snapped into place around us: no walls, no chains, just a loop closing tight. It was a cage disguised as freedom.

We were inside their prison now.

The clearing had not changed. There was the same leaning signpost and the same three roads, but when Ashen drew his sword, the blade’s reflection did not match. In the steel I saw him standing two paces behind me, arm still at his side.

“This place…” he muttered, scanning the horizon. “It’s lying to us.”

I could feel Lina swelling inside me, fierce with vindication. “This is what happens when you refuse to act. The world rewrites around us, and you just stand there clutching the book like it’s a shield. Use it, Elyne. Rewrite the snare. End it before it tightens.”

“No,” I whispered through gritted teeth. “That’s what they want.”

The fog thickened, a looping curtain that folded over itself again and again. I took a step forward and felt the stone underfoot turn to cold marble. Another step and the ground became wooden planks slick with rain. Behind me, Ashen swore. When I turned, there were two of him: one drawing his sword, one already collapsed in chains of light that hadn’t been there before.

“Elyne!” His voice cut through me. Only one Ashen now, his real body tangled in the contradictions, bound in a cage that kept rewriting itself , iron one heartbeat, rope the next, runes carved into air the next. Each shift tightened and locked him deeper.

I ran toward him, but the prison warped around me. The signpost appeared again, the three paths stretching away, mocking. No matter which road I took, I ended up staring at him from a different angle, too far to reach.

Lina surged forward, desperate, breaking through my restraint. “Let me do it! I can cut the loop. I can pull him free!”

Her plea was raw, almost childlike, but underneath it lay the hunger I feared. The same hunger that had broken her once before.

“No,” I snarled, fighting her grip on my limbs. My palms burned against the book. “Not at the cost of everything else. I won’t trade freedom for another cage.”

The fog pressed in closer, the clicking voices of the Proofreaders just beyond its veil. The trap was working. Ashen’s breath came ragged, his sword fallen from his hand. If I didn’t choose soon, he would vanish into the loop, rewritten into nothing.

Ashen’s shout echoed through the warped hall as the loops closed in on him. One moment he was ahead of us, the next he was swallowed by the lattice of contradictions, trapped in a cell that kept rewriting itself around his body. His face flickered through expressions that didn’t belong to the same second, caught between anger and despair.

Inside me, Lina surged like a tidal wave. “Rewrite it! Save him! Don’t let him vanish like the others! What’s the point of carrying the book if you won’t use it?”

Her desperation rattled my bones. My hand twitched toward the pages, instinct pulling me toward the forbidden answer. But I forced it still. The scar on my palm burned, the pain almost making me lose consciousness. The pain was the price inscribed on me, every rewrite demanded blood. Lina would spend it gladly. I would not.

“Don’t make me watch him vanish too,” she begged. Then sharper: “You’re no different from them if you let him go.” And finally, quieter, almost broken: “Please… I can’t fail another one.”

“No,” I said, with a voice hard enough to cut stone. “I will not bend the world to your guilt. Ashen is not a page you can scribble over.”

The prison shuddered, its seams cracking. It wasn’t my rewriting that broke it, but my endurance, my refusal to yield to the Proofreaders’ trap. A sound like glass shearing apart filled the air, and the loops collapsed. Ashen staggered free, breathing hard, but alive.

Lina screamed inside me. The sound ripped raw through every nerve followed by total, eerie silence.

Not the quiet of relief, but absence. She had withdrawn so violently it felt like a house gone dark, window after window extinguished until only hollow walls remained. I reached for her, but there was nothing, no presence, no protest, no pulse of shared thought.

And I knew that silence. It was the exile she had chosen once before, in the life she barely spoke of: four walls, locked doors, a world watched through glass but never touched. Her retreat now wasn’t anger. It was fear. Shame. The belief that the only safe place was nowhere at all.

Ashen touched my arm, searching my face. “What just happened?”

“Nothing,” I lied, though my voice cracked under the weight of it.

The snare dissolved, leaving only a plain too wide, too quiet. I clutched the book tighter, not as a weapon, but as ballast against the hollow echo where Lina’s voice should have been. The silence inside me was unbearable. For the first time since she returned, I was alone in my own head, and I hated it.