## NULL
BY NIKLUAS VERMONT
Have you ever wondered what it would feel like
to be trapped inside a story someone else is reading?
To wake up as the character you invented on your worst night,
the one you left powerless on purpose so the suffering would look beautiful on the page?
I used to wonder too.
Every time I posted a chapter at 4 a.m., exhausted, half-asleep,
I wondered what it would be like to live as the fantasy people scroll through,
to breathe the air I only ever typed.
Be careful what you wonder.
I stood in the abyss.
Cold, gusty wind clawed through my hair,
through my skin,
through the gaps where a soul should have been.
There was no ground.
There was no sky.
Only thick, velvet darkness that tasted like unfinished sentences.
And far away,
so far away it hurt to look,
a single point of light.
White.
Pure.
Perfect.
I reached for it.
I walked.
I ran.
I screamed.
The closer I got, the farther it fled.
Every step echoed with the sound of a page turning backward.
Where am I?
What is this place?
Then the darkness answered, in my own voice, stolen from a thousand sleepless nights:
You are exactly where you left yourself.
The light blinked once.
And the abyss spoke the last line I ever meant to write:
I AM NULL
(blank page)
Turn it.
The story is already descending without you.