The Gates of the Master Draft

“The gatekeeper of every story is not strength, but the question: why should you matter?”
— August Denier

The road narrowed until it felt less like stone and more like a line we had been forced to follow. To either side, the plain collapsed into fractures of story. There were fragments of villages that never finished building, battlefields frozen mid-charge, fields of dialogue without speakers drifting like smoke. Ahead, beyond all of it, the Master Draft finally came into view.

It was not a tower. Not a throne. It was a manuscript, vast and terrible, suspended in the air as though the sky itself had opened to hold it. Pages stretched outward like wings, their edges bleeding with a pale light that refused to stay still. Every shift of the parchment seemed to breathe, and with each breath came whispers, sentences cut in half, beginnings with no endings. The sound wasn’t loud, but it was everywhere, curling under my skin.

Two immense quills stood crossed before it, their tips dripping ink that fell in slow drops through the air, staining the ground and fading before it touched. They weren’t gates in the way cities built them, but the world knew what they were. We all did.

I stopped walking without realizing it. My chest tightened. Awe was too clean a word. Terror was closer. Standing here, I didn’t feel like someone meant to change the world. I felt like someone who was about to be swallowed by it.

Inside me, Lina stirred. Her voice was hesitant, almost reverent. “Do we deserve to stand here?”

Ashen’s boots crunched over the gravel, steady even when mine faltered. He didn’t look up at the Draft the way I did. His eyes stayed on the horizon, on the ink falling like rain. “Deserve it or not,” he muttered, “we’re here.”

I froze. My breath caught. He hadn’t heard her, he couldn’t have. But his words landed on the same wound Lina had pressed only moments before, the echo too sharp to ignore.

Inside me, she went still, almost reverent. And I… I didn’t know if it was coincidence or proof that the boundaries between us were thinning.

The wind shifted, though maybe it wasn’t wind at all. The air itself bent, as though reality didn’t want us stepping closer. But the book at my side grew warm, and for the first time since I began carrying it, I understood what it was doing. It wasn’t guiding me forward. It was waiting to see if I would.

The silence at the gates broke with a sound that wasn’t sound at all, the staccato snap of unseen keys, typewriter strokes rattling in unison. Out of the fog, three figures emerged, taller than any Proofreader I had ever seen. Their cloaks were white but stained faintly pink where the ink had run like blood. Their lenses burned red, twin embers that pierced through the shifting air. And their hands, not quills, not gloves, but blades of erasure, long and gleaming, as though they could cut not flesh but meaning.

They did not raise their hands. They did not move to strike. Instead, their voices fused into one, hollow and absolute:

“Passage requires proof. Not of power. Of purpose.”

The words struck the ground like verdicts. The air around us rippled, and the plain itself buckled into something else.

Ashen staggered first. The world around him shifted into a battlefield, though no armies stood there. His blade was still at his hip, his shield at his side, but his eyes narrowed as if he already knew the shape of the question before it was asked.

“What is a hero without a quest?” the voices demanded.

Ashen’s hand twitched toward his sword, then fell away. He exhaled, slow, steady. “A man with a choice,” he said. “I don’t need prophecy or glory. I stand because I choose to walk beside her.” His voice didn’t rise, but it carried. The battlefield dissolved, leaving him standing firmer than before.

Then Lina.

Her voice trembled through me before I saw what she saw. Pages littered the ground, thousands of them, each with her handwriting scrawled in familiar ink. I bent down instinctively. T names leapt at me. Valorix. Tomlin. A girl who never reached her coronation. All of them blotted, all of them half-erased. Lina’s voice cracked like glass inside my ribs. “I left them all unfinished. I don’t deserve another word.”

The Proofreaders’ red lenses glowed hotter. The pages began to burn.

“No,” I shouted, stepping forward, though the fire seared my eyes. “Unfinished doesn’t mean worthless. They mattered. They still matter. You don’t erase something just because it broke.”

The flames died down. The names didn’t return, but the silence that followed was no longer condemnation.

Then came my turn. The world collapsed into nothing, a void so empty it made the Hollow seem full. The Proofreaders’ voices pressed into me, heavy as chains.

“Why should you matter?”

My throat went dry. I wanted to reach for the book, to let it answer for me, but it burned against my side, as though warning me.

“I don’t matter because I was written,” I said, though my voice shook. “And not because I was forgotten. I matter because I choose. Because I keep writing forward, even when everything tells me to stop.”

The void trembled. The ground beneath us began to unravel into ash, the path erased beneath our feet. Panic surged. If I faltered now, we would vanish.

The book pulsed in my hand, begging to be wielded like a weapon. I nearly opened it. Nearly gave in. But then I heard Ashen’s voice: steady, grounded. “Not alone, Elyne.”

And Lina’s, soft, but firm, a thread pulling me upright. “We’re unfinished. That’s the point. But unfinished doesn’t mean erased.”

The world buckled. The Proofreaders raised their blades to strike, and then lowered them.

Together, we stepped forward. Not with triumph, not with certainty, but with defiance. Each of us scarred, each of us half-finished, and none of us willing to be unwritten.

The gates trembled. The Proofreaders raised their quills like halberds, and for a heartbeat I thought they would cut us down anyway, our defiance nothing more than noise in the face of law. But then the air shifted.

The blades dipped. Ink spilled from their tips, slow and heavy as rain, pattering on the stone. The Proofreaders did not vanish. Instead, they lowered themselves to their knees, lenses dimming to a static red. They folded into silence, not defeated, but acknowledging.

The path ahead cleared.

Ashen exhaled, the sound sharp against the stillness. “We passed.”

But I couldn’t move. My hand had gone to the book at my side, its cover pulsing faintly, as though it too had been tested. For so long I had resisted its pull, feared what it meant to use it. Now I opened it willingly, ready to write the line that would take us through the gates.

The page was not blank.

I froze. The words stared back at me, steady, deliberate. Not mine. Not Lina’s.

Denier’s hand.

Welcome back to the story you thought you abandoned.

My chest constricted. The ink was fresh, still wet enough to smear. Lina stirred faintly inside me, her breath catching like a sob. “That’s impossible.”

The glow of the Master Draft washed over the plain, pale at first, then blinding, as though the world itself was turning toward us. The ground hummed underfoot, trembling like a chord strung too tight, the promise of collapse or revelation in equal measure.

I gripped the book tighter, my voice a whisper. “Then we were never the authors at all.”

The silence that followed was total. The kind that comes not before the storm, but before the ending.

And the world waited.