Chapter 15 – The Editor's Margin
The page pulsed in Kael's hand like a second heartbeat.
"Editor?" Liora repeated, her voice wrapped in unease. "I thought the Realms were authored, not edited."
Bran crouched beside the page, examining the ink. "This isn't scribe-ink. It's something... older. Prequilline. Only found in manuscripts written before writing existed."
Kael stared at the back of the page. The single word still shimmered faintly:
Editor
It wasn't a title.
It was a warning.
That night, they camped beneath the skeletal remains of a fallen paragraph-tree, branches heavy with fragmented idioms. The stars blinked above them in strange sequences—morse code from forgotten realms.
Kael couldn't sleep.
He kept turning the page over and over.
Words were shifting.
They weren't static anymore.
Each time he looked, a new line emerged:
"The Editor corrects what the Author creates."
"The Editor does not write. It redacts."
"You were never the protagonist. Only the proof."
Liora sat up suddenly. "It's a sentient edit-loop."
Bran's eyes snapped open. "Someone's rewriting the past."
A rustling.
No, not rustling.
Erasing.
Entire patches of forest blinked out in strips. The trees. The sounds. Even the memory of them.
Gone.
"Run," Kael hissed. "It's editing this Realm."
But there was nowhere to run. Ahead of them, the landscape shimmered like unfinished thoughts. Behind, the forest crumbled into clean white nothingness, like someone pressing backspace across a world.
Out of the blankness, a figure emerged.
Faceless. Robed in parchment.
Fingers tipped with red ink.
The Editor.
Kael stepped forward. "Why are you here?"
The voice that answered came from within them—inside the spaces between their thoughts.
"To maintain clarity. You are a digression."
Liora raised her hands, casting a glyph of protection, but her spell vanished from existence before it formed.
Bran drew a blade.
It turned to ellipses in his hand.
Even reality obeyed The Editor.
But Kael gripped the whisper-page again.
And this time—it whispered back.
"There is one thing an Editor cannot erase."
"What?" Kael thought.
"A story told aloud."
He looked up. "Start telling," he said to Liora.
"What?"
"Speak. Out loud. Any tale. Anything!"
Liora stammered. "O-once there was a realm with too many kings and not enough crowns—"
The Editor flinched.
Kael yelled, "Bran—go!"
Bran roared, "A boy forged of myth, not metal, faced a sword made of regret and sang—"
The Editor shrieked—a sound like ink boiling off old scrolls.
Kael held the whisper-page high.
And spoke:
"This is our narrative. Unedited. Unapproved. Unafraid."
The Realm bent. The air cracked.
The Editor convulsed—and was flung back into the margins, stripped of its context.
When the silence returned, they stood amidst the ruins of almost-erasure.
Bran fell to his knees. "What the hell is this war?"
Kael looked at the whisper-page one final time. The ink was fading.
But a new line had appeared:
"The Final Editor is still watching.