Silas did not go to the Ministry of Prose the next morning. He couldn't. How could a man return to verifying the "sturdiness of a bridge" or the "sweetness of a fruit" when his own fingers were stained with the raw, obsidian ink of existence?
He stood in front of his bathroom mirror, scrubbing his hands. The water—labeled [Pure, cleansing stream]—ran over his skin, but the ink didn't budge. It had seeped into his pores, mapping out his veins like a new, dark nervous system. He looked up at his own Caption.
[Silas Vane, a man gripped by a sudden, irrational fever.]
"Irrational?" Silas hissed, his voice cracking. He grabbed his Silver Stylus and slashed it through the air, right where the words hovered. The tip of the Stylus hummed, a low frequency that made his teeth ache. For a second, the word [Irrational] flickered, turning into a garbled mess of characters: [&^@!#ional].
But then, the world pushed back. A sharp Clack echoed from the sky, and the text snapped back to its original form. The Author was proofreading. The Author was correcting him.
"Silas? Is everything alright?"
It was Clara. She was standing in the doorway, holding a tray. Above her: [A devoted wife, offering the comfort of a warm breakfast].
Silas turned, his eyes wild. He grabbed the tray and threw it. The porcelain plates—labeled [Fragile heirlooms]—hit the floor, but they didn't shatter into pieces. They shattered into letters. Hundreds of white 'P's, 'L's, and 'A's scattered across the floor tiles. There was no food, only the word [Oatmeal] written in a messy, grey pile.
"Look at this, Clara!" Silas pointed at the mess. "It's not real! None of it is!"
Clara didn't flinch. She didn't cry. She simply knelt and began to pick up the letters with her pale hands. "You're making a mess of the prose, Silas. If you keep this up, the Editor will have to intervene. And nobody wants a visit from the Editor."
"Who is the Editor?" Silas whispered.
Clara stopped. Her eyes went blank. Her Caption began to scroll rapidly, like a screen being refreshed. [A wife... A device... A warning... A wife...]
"The one who cuts the parts that don't fit," she said, her voice sounding like two people speaking in unison—one her own, and one much deeper, coming from the floorboards.
Silas fled the house. He ran toward the Great Library of Lexicon, the only place where the "Source Code" of their world might be hidden. The city felt different today. It felt thin. As he ran, he noticed that the edges of the buildings were no longer sharp. They looked like charcoal sketches, the lines smudged as if by a careless thumb.
He found Elias Sterling in the restricted archives. The old librarian was hunched over a desk, his Caption barely glowing: [A keeper of secrets that are better left unread].
"Elias," Silas panted. "I saw the Moon. I saw the Eye. I know we are being written."
Elias didn't look up. "We are all stories in the end, Silas. Some are just more edited than others."
"I found a book," Silas said, slamming the titleless volume from the previous day onto the desk. "It's about me. About tomorrow. It says you know something."
Elias finally looked up. His eyes were not pupils and irises; they were two dark periods—dots at the end of a sentence. "If you've seen the ink, Silas, then you've already begun to leak. You are no longer a 'Static Character.' You've become a 'Variable.' And Variables are usually killed off in the second act to provide 'Emotional Stakes' for the reader."
"I don't care about the stakes! I want to save Clara! She's disappearing into her own description!"
Elias sighed and reached into his desk, pulling out a vial of White-Out Fluid. "This is concentrated Nothingness. If you use the Stylus to inject this into a Caption, you can create a 'Narrative Void.' A place where the Author cannot see you. But be warned: once you are in the Void, you have no description. You have no name. You might simply... cease to be."
Before Silas could answer, the roof of the library groaned. The Clack-Clack-Clack returned, but this time, it was accompanied by a new sound: the sound of a Gigantic Eraser rubbing against the sky.
The back half of the library simply... vanished. The books, the shelves, the walls—they didn't fall. they were rubbed away, leaving behind a terrifying, infinite white space.
"He's starting to delete the chapter!" Elias yelled. "He's skipping the dialogue!"
Silas grabbed the vial and ran toward the white void. He saw a shadow in the distance—the figure of Clara. But it wasn't the Clara he loved. It was a 2D cutout of her, flickering like a dying film reel.
"Clara!"
He reached her just as the floor beneath them began to turn into a blank page. He took his Stylus, filled it with the White-Out Fluid, and stabbed it into the air between them.
A bubble of pure silence erupted. The text labels around them shattered. The Clack of the typewriter became muffled, as if they were underwater.
In this Narrative Void, Clara's eyes suddenly cleared. For the first time, her Caption was gone. She was just... Clara.
"Silas?" she whispered. Her voice was real. It had a crack in it. It had fear. "I remember... I remember a place before Lexicon. A place called... London? There was rain. Real rain. Not the kind that smells like adjectives."
"I'll get us back there," Silas promised, holding her hand. Her hand felt warm. Truly warm.
But then, Silas looked down. His feet were gone. The White-Out was working too well. Without a description to keep them "real," they were fading into the margin.
Suddenly, a massive shadow loomed over their bubble. Silas looked up and saw a Giant Cursor. It was blinking right above them.
The Author had found them. And the Author was highlighting their names.
[HIGHLIGHT: SILAS VANE & CLARA VANE]
[ACTION: DELETE?]
Silas looked directly into the "eye" of the cursor. He grabbed his Stylus and, instead of fighting the cursor, he turned it toward the bottom of the "page"—toward the reader.
"If you let him delete us," Silas screamed, his voice breaking through the glass of your screen, "then you are an accomplice! Stop reading! Close the book before he clicks 'Yes'!"
Clara vanished. The bubble popped.
Silas was left falling through a sea of jumbled letters, a protagonist without a plot, plummeting toward Chapter 3.