The world opened on a glitch.
Not a sound—sound was too small.
A concept tearing.
KRNNNNNH—THRUM—WHUP-WHUP-WHUP—
Reality staggered like a wounded animal as Kael slammed back into his body, knees deep in the shattered manuscript of Dominus's Great Edit.
Ink rained upward.
Gravity forgot itself.
Stars bent into knots.
And at the center of the collapsing script-realm, the Saints hovered like pale, feverish gods—robes rustling with the quiet arrogance of creatures convinced history belonged to them by divine inheritance.
Dominus lounged on his broken throne of half-written commandments, fingers drumming on the armrest, eyes glowing with the pleasure of someone about to win.
"Your story ends here, little aberration," he declared, voice echoing with stolen authorial weight.
Kael's heart answered with a throb that shook the entire realm.
Something inside him tried to uncoil—slow, ancient, hungry.
Something that remembered every edit they had carved into him.
Every memory they "corrected."
Every person they erased to keep him obedient.
A whisper crawled across his spine, Veyra's voice bleeding through the link:
"Don't let them overwrite you again," she pleaded, tone brittle as cracked glass.
Seraphine appeared beside her in a burst of reversed flame, cloak snapping like a dying star being forced back to life.
"Kael," she warned, "they're trying to anchor the rewrite. Fight them."
Fight.
He'd been fighting all his life.
It had never been enough.
But this time—this time something else fought with him.
The Abyss inside him blinked awake.
The Saints Begin Their Edit
Dominus raised a golden quill the size of a spear.
"Begin the Purification Draft," he commanded.
The Saints formed a circle, halos crackling with glyphs.
SHHHK—SHHLKKK—WHOOOOOOOM—
Lines of new text slithered across the sky like glowing parasites. Each word tried to stitch itself into Kael's skin, rewriting bone, muscle, thought:
KAEL NEVER LOVED ANYONE
KAEL NEVER DEFIED THE SAINTS
KAEL DIES AS AN EMPTY TOOL
Veyra snarled, thorns erupting from her arms. "Touch him with your lies again and I will rip your halos off," she growled.
Srephine'sflame-wings snapped open. "Saints fear only one thing," she announced. "A story that refuses them."
Dominus twirled his quill. "Nothing refuses me."
Kael's Mind Breaks… Wrongly for Them
The edits pierced his skull like molten needles.
KRSH-CHHK-CHHHHHK!
Memories shattered. Others rearranged themselves. His vision pixelated, then smeared, then split into versions that did not agree.
Veyra dying.
Veyra alive.
Veyra never existing.
Seraphine laughing.
Seraphine screaming.
Seraphine erased.
A world where he was obedient.
A world where he was silent.
A world where he had never loved, never chosen, never mattered.
Dominus smirked as Kael staggered, blood dripping from his left eye as glowing ink.
"See?" Dominus mocked. "Even his self collapses on command."
Kael breathed once.
Twice.
Every breath shook the manuscript-realm harder.
And then—
He laughed.
Not joy.
Not surrender.
A broken, jagged, impossible laugh that did not fit into the Saints' rewrite.
Dominus froze. "What…?"
Kael looked up.
Ink tears rolled down his cheeks, but his smile was sharp enough to cut holy flesh.
"You should've rewritten me before I learned to rewrite myself," he whispered, voice flickering with something not entirely human.
The Saints stepped back.
They felt it.
The wrongness.
The inversion.
The Abyss rewriting the edit trying to rewrite it.
A paradox with teeth.
The Silence That Refuses
Kael lifted his hand.
Black script rose off his skin like steam—feral, disobedient, breathing.
Not the Saints' words.
His.
FWSSSSSH—
Reality recoiled from it.
Dominus panicked first.
"No. No—stop. STOP! You are not permitted to—"
Kael stepped forward.
"You don't own my story anymore."
The entire realm shook.
The Abyss inside him—no longer sleeping, no longer chained—began to write back.
And not politely.