The book was cool under my hand.
No hum. No glow. No chorus of ominous whispers. Just paper and leather and the faint texture of worn edges against my palm.
Then the room vanished.
Not with a dramatic rush or a sense of movement. One blink I was in the stone chamber with the pillar and the cadets and Captain Dorn; the next, everything else had been edited out.
No walls. No ceiling. No floor I could see. Just white.
Not blank white. Too deep for that. It felt like standing in the middle of a page that hadn't decided what to hold yet.
The book was still there.
It hovered at chest height in front of me, cover closed. No pillar. No supports. Just hanging, like the world thought gravity was optional for props.
"Okay," I said. My voice sounded like it came from slightly behind me. "This is… new."
Instinctively, I checked my body.
Same boots, same clothes, same new shape. Weight in the wrong familiar places. My stance had adjusted a little—knees closer together, shoulders pulled in—but my head was still trying to balance like it had the old frame.
I tried to remember my original face again. The boy in the mirror that morning. It came, but fuzzed, like an old photo behind glass. The new version of me felt… nearer. Not more right. Just the one my brain reached for first.
That scared me more than the white.
The book waited.
Up close, the cover had no title, no embossing. Just dark, worn material. The kind of book that looked like it had been handled a lot by someone who cared about it and maybe should not have.
I let my hand slide from the cover to the edge and lifted.
The moment the pages cracked open, ink poured out.
Not liquid. Words.
Lines of text spilled into the air like smoke and rearranged themselves in front of me, forming strips, paragraphs, whole pages hung in the white.
They weren't neat. Sentences started and broke. Paragraphs repeated with tiny differences. Some lines were half-erased as I watched.
I caught a phrase:
– Jace woke up to the sound of the alarm coughing itself apart –
Then it blinked, and the sentence changed.
– Jace woke up before the alarm and watched the cracks in the ceiling count down –
Then another version:
– Jace didn't sleep the night before conscription –
My stomach flipped.
The pages weren't just replaying what had happened.
They were showing what could have. Might have. Almost did.
Scenes flickered around me: me missing the train; me being late to the hall; the crack in the wall opening ten minutes earlier and swallowing a nearly empty room; the creature targeting someone else first.
In one version, I never clapped. The creature tore through three cadets before Dorn brought it down. Arlen's face was still in the crowd there. In another, I clapped too late, and Dorn took the hit meant for me.
I reached out on impulse.
My fingers brushed a sentence.
– the creature's claws closed around his throat –
The words shivered at my touch and dissolved. In their place, a new line wrote itself.
– the creature's claws scraped stone where he had been a heartbeat before –
I snatched my hand back like I'd touched fire.
The Law inside me stirred, recognition and unease twisted together.
"Conditional," I muttered. "You like ifs."
The white didn't answer.
More pages flipped past, faster now. I saw flashes of other halls, other cadets, other captains. Dorn younger. Dorn older. Dorn not there at all.
Some versions ended in white where the scene just—stopped. Threads cut. Drafts abandoned.
"This is what you do," I said to the book. To the space. To Beolryve, if that's what this was. "You try things. Change them. Throw them away."
Ink crawled across one of the hovering pages, forming words in a different, heavier script.
NOT JUST ME.
The letters hung there, solid and undeniable.
I swallowed. "So we're partners in crime now?"
The words blurred, then reformed.
YOU PULL. I REWEAVE.
A laugh scraped out of my throat. It didn't sound like it belonged to either version of my face.
"That would sound reassuring," I said, "if you weren't charging rent in my head every time I touch anything."
Another line scrawled itself lazily.
EVERY LAW HAS A PRICE.
Bits of earlier pages drifted around us, thin as ash. Some sentences were incomplete:
– no one in my squad dies –
– PRIMARY TH –
– the safest room in Verrin –
They brushed against my sleeves and dissolved, leaving faint impressions of emotions more than words. Fear. Anger. Determination. All too familiar.
The book flipped open wider.
In the center of the spread was a blank space shaped like a paragraph that hadn't been written yet.
Above it, a single, sharp line:
CURRENT BRANCH: UNNAMED.
Below it, more words began to appear, one by one.
REN, JACE. ZONE 17–LOWER. FIRST CONTACT WITH BEOLRYVE: UNRECORDED.
"Unrecorded?" I echoed. "Pretty sure we met five minutes ago."
The ink hesitated, like it was considering how honest it wanted to be.
EARLIER, it wrote instead.
Images flickered at the edge of my vision. A family apartment that wasn't ours. A different train. A different winter. Me, younger, standing in front of a screen full of static, watching a shape resolve—
The memory snapped before it finished.
Whatever had been there wasn't just blurred; it had been cut.
I reeled.
"You already tried this," I said slowly. "You tried this story. With me. Before."
The pages around me rustled without wind.
FAILED DRAFT, a dozen margins whispered.
"Good," I said, more viciously than I meant to. "You're not as good at this as you think."
The book's ink scratched a new sentence, the strokes a little tighter now.
YOU LIVED THIS FAR.
"Not for lack of trying on your part," I said.
The blank paragraph under CURRENT BRANCH waited.
I could feel the expectation in it. The pressure. Like the Domain had gotten into the habit of somebody else telling it what happened next and was now looking at me for the line.
You pull. I reweave.
If I stayed passive, it would write something anyway. It always did. It would run its own script—test, trap, teeth—and move us through until we broke or it did.
If I leaned in… I could shove it. Bend it. Break scenes instead of cadets. At a cost.
I thought about Arlen clutching the coin, about the Domain shaving smells and certainties and bits of my past off each time I gave it an if.
About Dorn standing in front of a room built from her worst day and saying the line anyway.
Another thought arrived, clean and sharp.
If you're going to be in a story either way, better to have your hands on the pen.
I didn't know if that was mine or something the Domain liked to hear.
"You want something from me," I said. "Specific. Not just… pushes. Not just trip-the-monster and don't-kill-the-classroom."
Ink uncoiled across the page.
NAME THIS BRANCH.
I blinked. "That's it?"
CALL IT, the book insisted. LAW FOLLOWS NAMES.
The word Beolryve carved into the pillar, still lingering behind my eyes. Law of Broken Stories. Draft after draft until one stuck.
Name, then.
Names had weight. Dorn had said so. Concord believed it enough to whisper labels like this one.
I picked something that didn't sound like an order or a prayer. Something that would annoy whatever was listening just a little.
"Fine," I said. "Call it the branch where I walk out of here and you don't get to be the only one telling it."
The book waited.
"That's too long," I added. "We'll go with…"
The first word that came to mind was the one scratched under the wall inscription in the corridor. The one that had refused to blur.
"Beolryve," I said. "You like it so much, you can wear it too. This mess is ours now."
The white stretched.
For a heartbeat, I thought I'd broken something fundamental. The pages froze. The tumbling fragments halted mid-fall.
Then, like a breath let out, new words wrote themselves across the blank.
BRANCH: BEOLRYVE
STATUS: OPEN
The Law inside me thrummed, a low, dangerous note. The sensation of stepping off a ledge and feeling the world decide whether or not to catch you.
"Great," I muttered. "We're co-branding."
The space around us rippled.
The pages folded in on themselves, lines collapsing, sentences knitting into tighter and tighter spirals until they sank back into the book. The hovering ash of broken drafts dissolved.
The book snapped shut under my hand.
Pain came with it.
This one wasn't sharp. It was deep.
Something went through the middle of my chest—not physically, but through the place where my memories sat in some halting, half-organized line.
I felt it take something and I felt that something go, but I couldn't see what it was. Like a word on the tip of my tongue dissolving.
I grabbed for whatever I could.
My uncle's laugh. Still there.
The Scar's first appearance. Still there.
Captain Dorn's face. Still there.
My old voice—
For a second, both versions layered. The way I'd sounded this morning, the way I sounded now. One of them slipped.
I couldn't remember what my laugh used to be like.
I heard the sound in my head and couldn't tell which version belonged to which.
The book didn't care.
LAW CONFIRMED, it wrote along the spine.
Then the white fissured.
Cracks spiderwebbed through the blank like someone dropping a stone on a frozen lake. The world splintered. The book fell, and with it, so did I.
The stone room slammed back into existence.
I staggered, hand still on the cover.
Captain Dorn was in front of me, arm out like she'd been about to grab my wrist. The cadets ringed the room, eyes wide. The pillar, the carved words, everything—right where it had been.
My lungs dragged in air like I'd been holding my breath for an hour.
"How long," I croaked. "How long was I… gone?"
"A heartbeat," Dorn said.
Her gaze searched my face, then dropped to my hand on the book.
"What happened?" she asked. Quietly. For me, not for the room.
"It… showed me things," I said. "Other versions. Dead ends. Called this a 'branch'. Wanted a name."
"And you," she said, "what did you do?"
"I named it," I said. "Us. This. Whatever we are right now. I told it this branch is Beolryve."
Something like satisfaction flickered in her eyes, quick and grim.
"Good," she said.
"That's good?" I said. "Because I feel like I just signed a contract in crayon and blood."
"You told it this isn't just its story," she said. "You staked a flag. That matters."
"It also took something," I said. "Again."
"What?"
I opened my mouth.
I didn't know.
"I… can't remember what my own laugh used to sound like," I said finally.
The words felt small and stupid compared to "holes in skull" and "clocks made of hearts," but they sat wrong in my chest.
Arlen's expression pinched. "That's—"
"That's how it pays itself," Dorn cut in. "Piece by piece. It's not going to take anything you won't miss at first. That's how these Laws work."
"Comforting," I said.
"It's not here to comfort you." She looked at the book. "But it's not just predation. It's structure. It has habits. We can use those."
She reached past me and, with careful, deliberate fingers, closed the book all the way.
The carved words on the pillar shifted.
CURRENT SUBJECT: REN, JACE
BRANCH: BEOLRYVE
STATUS: IN PROGRESS
Dorn snorted softly. "Pretentious rock," she said.
One of the cadets couldn't help it. "What… what does that mean? In progress?"
"It means we're not dead yet," she said. "And that whatever passes for an Author in this place is paying attention."
She turned, raising her voice.
"Same rule as before," she told the group. "What happened in this room goes nowhere near an official debrief, unless it comes out of my mouth first. If anyone asks, the book was a standard Domain anchor, inert, and I hit it with a stick until it behaved."
A few of them actually smiled.
"And if Concord priests ask?" someone quavered.
"You tell them Captain Lysa Dorn gave you that wording," she said. "If they have a problem, they can discuss it with me in a structurally stable reality, at a safe distance from you."
Iconic line, logged.
The pillar rumbled under her hand.
A crack traced itself down its side, then spread onto the floor, racing to the far wall. The stone there split like paper, peeling back.
Beyond it lay not white, not fog—just darkness. Deep and heavy. The kind that swallowed light instead of reflecting it.
The Domain wasn't done. The book had been a negotiation, not an exit.
Dorn rolled her shoulders, settling the makeshift weapon there again.
"Congratulations, Cadet Ren," she said. "You've officially annoyed a Law. Let's see how it throws its next tantrum."
She glanced at me, measuring something I couldn't see.
"Stay close," she added. "If this thing starts improvising around you, I want a front-row seat."
"Sure," I said. "Wouldn't want to miss my own disaster."
We stepped toward the new opening.
The darkness beyond didn't feel empty. It felt like teeth waiting for a line.
The Law in my bones thrummed, quietly, like a pen tapping the edge of a page.