Days have passed after the field trip, yet, even now that ache in my chest refused to fade. I know I should speak to him, tell him that I won't leave, tell him that I...
Only want to remain by his side.
I don't want him remaining vulnerable. Not when Marianne and her two other lackeys have started to move in the shadows, waiting for the slightest chance to reach him.
That I cannot allow. But how...
No.
I can erase them from this story.
Wipe them out. Remove them entirely.
That way, I can take my time dealing with what needs to be dealt with...
Kyle's need for reassurance.
But if I am to erase Marianne...
that would mean erasing her from Kyle's memories.
And as much as I despise admitting it, her presence, her cruelty, her pressure, her very existence shaped pieces of him.
Pieces I have come to cherish.
To remove her is to unmake part of the boy he became.
To rewrite the pain that forged his gentleness.
To tamper with the fractures that gave him the capacity to care so deeply.
No matter how tempting it is, I cannot risk altering that.
The consequences would be... unpredictable.
Potentially irreversible.
And losing the Kyle I know, even by my own hand,
is a risk I must not take.
What I can do, however...
is shift the foundation beneath her.
Perhaps I can rewrite her position as the next in line for the Auclait Matriarch.
Strip her of the power that enables her reach.
Cut the roots without disturbing the branches Kyle remembers.
With that, nothing essential to him is touched.
Nothing that might warp who he becomes.
Had I not cared for Kyle, that girl... Marianne... I would have erased her already.
Effortlessly.
A single thought, and she would vanish from every thread of this story.
But for now, I will settle for something cleaner.
More precise.
I will eliminate her ability to act.
Perhaps erase her obsession with Kyle while I'm at it.
That is good enough.
Not as satisfying as total erasure...
but effective nonetheless.
---
Somewhere in France, a girl named Marianne Auclait froze mid-step as something within her shifted.
The connections she once commanded dissolved without ceremony.
The influence she held, inherited, cultivated, feared vanished as if it had never belonged to her at all.
And a fragment of her mind, the one shaped around a boy named Kyle, quietly unraveled.
She was no longer the Marianne groomed to stand at the pinnacle of her lineage.
No longer the threat she once posed.
Now she was simply another girl, stripped of the narrative weight she believed was hers by right, because a goddess who holds the fates of stories between her fingers found her... inconvenient.
Then a voice brushed against her consciousness. Calm, collected, inevitable:
"Be grateful. For I have given you mercy."
And as effortlessly as it appeared, it withdrew, leaving no trace of its presence except the words now carved into the deepest layers of her mind.
Marianne's legs buckled. She collapsed to her knees, trembling uncontrollably.
Cold sweat dripped down her skin; her breath hitched in shallow, ragged bursts. Her teeth clattered as if her body were trying to flee itself.
She had not seen anything.
She had not heard anything.
Yet she felt something that existed beyond the boundaries of terror,
the residual echo of a being so far above her that even its mercy was indistinguishable from annihilation.
---
"Marianne Auclait's influence fades, accusations bleed through," I murmured as my pen glided across the pages of 272 Days Until... within the All Fiction Archive.
"Her obsession with Kyle wanes, descending into the deepest chambers of her subconscious, never to surface again."
More words flowed, each one gently rearranging the fabric of her existence.
I paused, the tip of my pen hovering over the page, considering the next line,
the next move,
the next consequence.
A sudden thought, perhaps the voice of another, forced its way into my consciousness.
Only because I allowed it.
A ripple of causality brushed against the edge of my mind.
Drovkah.
"Anathasia, what do you think you're doing? To remove a character's narrative weight like-"
"I'm aware. But so what?" I cut him off, my pen still moving as I flipped through the pages, smoothing out any major shifts that might disrupt the narrative.
None required real attention.
"Drovkah," I continued, a small smile touching my lips, "you haven't been active for quite some time now, yes?"
"So tell me, what gives you the right to judge my decisions?"
Silence.
He was choosing his next approach.
Futile. Any attempt at persuasion was already beyond saving.
The only sound was the turning of pages, a sound only I could hear.
Then, finally:
"I am not judging your decisions," he said, and there was a pause. Hesitation. "But if you're aware, then the consequences of such actions could potentially-"
"Strain the story, upset the balance, destabilize existence within our narrative?" I interrupted again, brushing my thumb along the page as I corrected a small inconsistency caused by my earlier rewrite.
"I have already addressed those meager repercussions. Even now, while we converse."
The words in the book rearranged themselves, forming new sentences, then paragraphs that smoothened out the rest.
Silence, then a sigh.
"If that is what you say, then I will trust your judgement."
The voice disappeared, dissolving back into the lower stratum.
"Impressive," I whispered with a soft chuckle, closing the book with a gentle thud.
"To reach the Archive as nothing more than a ripple... that already surpasses most.
Perhaps even the Second Fragment."
I paused, then shook my head.
"No. Not even close. Kagariel would still eclipse him... if he were not so terribly still."
With that thought, I allowed my form to dissolve into the book, slipping through its pages like ink returning to its source.
The next moment, my eyes fluttered open.
My room greeted me, dim, quiet, unchanged.
"Ah... that's right," I murmured. "I fell asleep."
But then something stirred.
A sensation. A fracture.
Not a premonition, not a memory, something between the two, pressing insistently against my consciousness.
"What is this...?"
Images flooded in, vivid and impossible.
Moments I had no recollection of.
Moments that should not exist.
"Why am I-"
And then I saw him.
Kyle.
Being dragged away.
My breath hitched, my pulse tightening.
I forced myself to stay composed, letting the vision unfold before I interfered.
Where was I in all this?
"-?! There you are."
I froze.
There I was, cornered, bloodied, pressed against a warped subspace I did not recognize. Not the me of now, but the earlier me... the one who had not yet ascended into All Fiction.
She fought.
Desperately.
Hopelessly.
Those beings, whatever they were, overwhelmed her with cruel ease.
Every defense broke.
Every attempt crumbled.
And all the while, Kyle was being taken further and further beyond her reach.
The strain shattered her focus.
Her panic became their opportunity.
One of the beings stepped forward. Its voice reverberated through the subspace, each word cracking the air.
"This is your punishment for abandoning your position, Anathasia."
My past self faltered. Not from fear, but from recognition.
"You do not deserve the title you hold," it continued. "You allowed selfishness to consume you. You destabilized the balance."
A pause.
Judgment.
Sentence.
"Thus, your power will be retrieved, and your title relinquished."
Darkness swallowed the being's arm, coalescing into a blade inscribed with eldritch script. It lifted the sword
But before it could strike, the me of that time did something reckless.
Brilliant.
Stupid.
Irrational.
She reached inward, not for strength, but for authority.
For dominion.
And with the last remnants of her will, she rewrote them.
The beings convulsed, their forms unraveling into howling vortices of void, stripped apart by a desperate reclaiming of sovereignty.
A bold move.
A doomed move.
Because the cost became clear:
She rewrote everything.
Every event.
Every consequence.
Every line leading to this moment.
And in the end... she isolated herself.
Wove herself into a corner of the story.
Removed her own place at Kyle's side.
He didn't even remember.
My chest tightened.
"...Is this what the book was meant to become?"
All those threads—Marianne, her accomplices, those beings, converging into a single, tragic finale.
I exhaled slowly.
"How elegant."
A pity, truly.
Because without realizing it...
"I seem to have overridden the Author's desired ending."
Nonetheless, my current priority at the moment was simply... him.
Original endings or story rewrite doesn's matter. I still had to somehow solve what was bothering him.
However, I still had to be mindful of my actions, lest I incur something that would cause a major change on what makes him, him.
Though, I suppose I must thank The Constant for tipping the scales. And upon doing so also expanded my reach beyond just the foundation.
"That ending... that's one tragedy averted."