The Master Draft Wakes

“Every author invents a god. Mine was cruelty, dressed as truth.”
— August Denier

The plain narrowed until it felt less like a road and more like a vein feeding into a single, impossible heart. Broken worlds pressed close on either side: a half-built village that ended in skeletal beams, a battlefield frozen with soldiers mid-charge, their banners unraveling into smoke. All of it funneled toward the horizon where the Master Draft waited.

The Proofreaders lined the way. Dozens of them, perhaps hundreds, knelt in perfect rows, their cloaks spread around them like the habits of pale monks. Quills lowered, lenses dimmed, they didn’t move. They didn’t need to. Their silence was worship.

And above them, suspended in the air, the Master Draft revealed itself. Not a tower. Not a throne. A manuscript vast enough to drown a kingdom, its pages stretching outward like wings caught in a wind that did not exist. Light bled from their edges, too pale to be holy, too steady to be fire. With every shift of the parchment, the air seemed to breathe, and in that breath I heard sentences begin and cut off, half-thoughts dissolving before they reached their end. The sound wasn’t loud. It was everywhere, curling into my skin, into my lungs.

My steps faltered. Awe was too clean a word; terror was closer. I had spent so long chasing this path, fighting to claim it, yet standing here I didn’t feel like someone meant to change the world. I felt like someone about to be swallowed whole by it.

Inside me, Lina stirred. Her presence wasn’t sharp this time but trembling, reverent. “Do we deserve to stand here?”

The book at my side seared against my hip, sudden heat warning me not to reach for it. My breath caught.

Ashen’s boots crunched steadily over the gravel. He didn’t look up at the Draft the way I did. His eyes stayed fixed on the horizon, on the ink falling like rain across the kneeling Proofreaders. His voice was quiet but hard enough to hold me steady.

“Deserve it or not,” he said, “we’re here.”

* * *

The air rippled, not with wind but with the sudden shift of a curtain pulled back. The pages of the Master Draft turned without hands, a sound like thunder pressed through parchment, and the light sharpened until it was hard to see. I raised my arm to shield my eyes, but it wasn’t enough. The voice arrived not in my ears, but everywhere at once.

“Welcome back.”

It was smooth, deliberate, threaded with familiarity that cut me deeper than any Proofreader’s blade. I knew that cadence. The world knew it. I had read it a thousand times, whispered it in the dark when I needed words stronger than my own.

August Denier.

Lina gasped inside me. It was not surprise, but recognition that tore at her like glass. Her voice cracked through my ribs: “No. No, that isn’t—”

The Draft turned another page. Words shimmered across its surface, ink still wet, lines scrawled in the same hand that had filled every notebook Lina ever kept.

“Of course it is,” the voice said, patient and merciless. “You gave me life when you gave me your name. A name is a mask. A mask is a voice. And once a voice is written, it endures.”

The ground shuddered under us, trembling like the weight of meaning alone could crack it. Statues of characters long gone flickered at the edge of the plain: Valorix with his unclaimed sword, Tomlin with his fractured laugh, the girl who called Ashen “Father.” All of them half-real, their presence demanded by the Draft’s hunger.

“You wrote them into me,” August continued. “Their pain, their deaths, their silence. All were tools. You knew that endings required blood. You knew that meaning required sacrifice. Do not pretend otherwise.”

Lina surged forward, seizing my throat from within. For the first time in days she fought not to control but simply to be heard. “I never meant— I never wanted—”

“You wanted them broken,” August cut in, the Draft’s pages turning so fast the air screamed. “Because you believed pain was the only truth worth writing.”

Ashen’s hand brushed his sword, though even he seemed to understand the futility of steel here. His jaw clenched. His eyes stayed on me. Not on the book, not on the Draft, not on the storm of words, but on me, as though waiting for me to answer.

I pressed a hand to my chest, where Lina thrashed like a bird against glass. “She isn’t you,” I said, my voice shaking. “You’re a shadow she made. Nothing more.”

The light bent. For a heartbeat the pages of the Draft rippled, and in their glow I saw Lina, not the ghost within me, but standing apart, her body trembling, her face pale with grief. She was me and not me, broken and unfinished.

“I gave him everything,” she whispered, staring up at the manuscript as if seeing a god she had prayed to and now feared. “Every fear, every cruelty, every weakness I wouldn’t let myself speak. And it became him.”

Her voice fractured. “August isn’t just a mask. He’s all the worst of me. The part that thought love was weakness. That thought breaking them made them real.”

Ashen stepped forward, his voice iron. “Then break him.”

The Draft’s voice thundered back, rattling through the hollow sky. “You cannot break me. I am the hand that writes the world. I am what you feared most. I am the proof that cruelty endures.”

The ground cracked. Proofreaders rose from their kneel, lenses burning crimson, hands unfurling quills that had turned into blades.

Lina turned to me, no longer a whisper inside, but a figure standing with me in the light of her own ruin. Her voice shook, but her eyes met mine.

“We can’t fight him with endings,” she said. “We have to write something new.”

The pages of the Master Draft beat like wings, each turn shuddering the plain beneath us. The quills that marked its gate had become lances, poised and burning with a red so deep it seemed to erase the sky. August’s voice poured over everything. It was relentless, booming, and impossible to silence.

“You cannot unmake me. I am every cut you called necessary. Every line you struck to tighten the tale. I am survival through sacrifice. I am the truth you fed the world.”

Lina trembled beside me, half-formed but no longer hidden in my ribs. She stood, barefoot on the fractured plain, shoulders hunched as though the Draft itself were pressing down on her. “And I let you happen,” she whispered. “I let you become everything I was too afraid to face.”

August laughed, or the Draft laughed through him, a sound like a typewriter jammed and hammering all the same. “Afraid? No, Lina. You reveled in me. You wore my mask so gladly you forgot where it ended and you began.”

The Proofreaders moved. Three, then six, then dozens, their cloaks unfolding in unison, blades lifted high. They advanced in silence, their red lenses fixed not on me or Ashen, but on her. On Lina.

I stepped forward, planting myself between them. My chest felt like it might split apart, but my voice carried anyway. “She isn’t yours. Not anymore.”

Ink rained from the Draft, drops hissing as they struck the ground. Whole fragments of story collapsed in the distance, battlefields folding into void, cities vanishing like smoke. August’s voice pressed harder. “You think her guilt can be undone by your defiance? You think freedom is anything but another cruelty? What will you write, girl, when you realize the only stories that last are the ones carved in pain?”

Lina’s hand brushed mine. Her touch was shaking, cold, but real. “He’s right about one thing,” she said. Her eyes locked with mine. “I can’t erase what I did. The stories I broke… they won’t come back.”

My throat tightened. “Then we don’t bring them back. We move forward.”

Her fingers dug into mine like she was anchoring herself to the words. “Not just you. Us. Together. No more cages. No more silence.”

Ashen raised his sword beside us, his voice steady, grounding. “Then write it.”

The book at my side burned against my hip. I pulled it free, my hand shaking as it fell open. Blank pages shimmered, begging for an ending, begging for August’s words to flood in and finish it. But I pressed the quill to the paper anyway, even as the ink of the Draft storm tried to swallow mine whole.

“I am not your Oracle,” I wrote. “I am not your mask. I am not your god.”

The words bled bright, defiant. August roared, the Draft’s pages snapping violently, trying to smother the lines as soon as I made them. But Lina’s hand closed over mine. Together we wrote again.

“We are unfinished. And that is why we endure.”

The words blazed so fiercely the Proofreaders faltered, their blades of erasure stuttering mid-swing. One by one, they lowered their arms, their lenses dimming as though the command that bound them had been broken.

The Master Draft convulsed, whole chapters tearing from its body and spiraling into ash. August’s voice shrieked through the air, hollow now, desperate. “You can’t kill me. I am every wound you left on the page. I am the truth you swore by.”

Lina’s voice rose against him, no longer trembling, no longer ashamed. “Then fade with me. Fade with what I was. Because this story belongs to her now.”

I pressed the final words, my hand steady where it had once faltered. “The author is not the ending. The story lives beyond.”

The pages split. Light poured outward, searing, blinding, a brightness that carried no pain. The Master Draft dissolved into fragments that lifted like birds breaking free of a cage, their wings scattering into the sky. August’s voice howled once more, then stilled, silence rushing in to replace him.

The world held its breath. Ashen lowered his blade. Lina turned to me, her outline trembling but unbroken. “We did it,” she whispered.

This was not triumph or conquest. It was a continuation. It was survival. For once, maybe the first time since the beginning, I believed her.