The apartment was small, cluttered, and dimly lit, nestled between two narrow buildings that seemed to breathe shadows into the room. Kai sat hunched over his desk, bathed in the pale glow of a desk lamp, the air heavy with the scent of old paper, coffee, and frustration. The cluttered shelves around him were filled with half-finished manuscripts, crumpled pages, and empty mugs—souvenirs of a life consumed by one thing: his novel.
He glanced at the screen—at the blinking cursor that mocked him with its impassive pulse. The first draft was done, but he could already feel the inadequacies of the plot clinging to the edges, unraveling like frayed string. His fingers hovered above the keyboard as if frozen, yet the words that had once flowed from him now felt trapped within his chest, too heavy to release.
"I can fix it in the next draft," he muttered to himself, exhaling slowly. It had become a mantra, a promise he repeated to himself every time the words didn't match the vision in his mind.
But now\... now there was a bitter weight to it. A finality. A looming truth that gnawed at him—the book was incomplete, his vision was fractured, and no matter how many revisions he made, it never felt like enough. This novel wasn't just a work of fiction; it was a part of him, an extension of his soul. Every character, every world he created, was his. He was the god of this universe, yet somehow, he couldn't control it. It slipped through his fingers like sand.
He let out a long breath, the frustration making his shoulders ache. The clicking of keys under his fingertips felt more like a desperate attempt to chase something just out of reach. His gaze flickered to the stack of crumpled papers beside the keyboard—characters he'd abandoned, plot threads that didn't make sense, a world that had outgrown him.
The clock on the wall ticked, its hands creeping toward the hour. Kai barely noticed it. His entire focus was consumed by the glaring screen in front of him. He had poured everything into this, his hopes, his dreams, and now it was ending—unfinished. He'd come so close, but not close enough.
With a final, exhausted sigh, he leaned back in his chair, rubbing his temples. The stress was too much. The deadlines, the self-imposed expectations—it was too much. He felt as though his body were giving up, his energy draining from him, slipping away as the world outside the window darkened into a blanket of night. His hand trembled slightly as it hovered over the keyboard.
"I'll fix it in the next draft," he whispered again, this time to no one in particular.
His fingers dropped to the keys one last time, typing the final sentence: "And so, the hero's journey would begin… or would it end?"
As the final letter appeared on the screen, something inside him snapped. The tension in his chest—an all-consuming pressure—burst in a sudden, violent wave. His vision blurred, the edges of the room distorting into a swirl of color and darkness. His hand shot out to grab his mug, but it missed, sending the half-filled coffee cup tumbling to the floor.
His breath came in shallow gasps as his heart raced, a sharp, staccato rhythm that made his chest ache. The world around him seemed to contract, then expand, as though reality itself was warping in his mind. The weight of exhaustion finally caught up to him. A dizzying sensation filled his head, as if the very fabric of his existence was unraveling.
Then, the darkness took him.
For a long moment, there was nothing. No pain. No sensation. Just a suffocating silence.
Kai's mind, once filled with chaos, was now empty. His thoughts were scattered like dust in a storm. Was he dead? Had he... passed on? Was this what it felt like to cease existing?
His lungs burned, and for a fleeting moment, he thought he could hear his own heartbeat. But it was distant, fading, as if he were outside of himself.
Suddenly, the void around him shifted. The oppressive blackness was replaced by a piercing, unnatural light—white and bright, but somehow sterile, as though it lacked warmth. It flickered erratically, like a dying bulb struggling to stay on. As his senses returned, his vision cleared to reveal nothing but an infinite expanse of darkness.
"Where am I?" he whispered, but no sound left his lips. It was as though the very air had swallowed his voice.
Then, a voice—familiar and distant—echoed in the space around him.
"Chapter One: The Death of Kaien Lior."
His blood ran cold. The words were his own—his writing, his creation. The name, Kaien Lior, sounded like an unfamiliar echo, a name he'd written but never fully realized. It was like hearing a name in a dream, one that didn't belong to you, yet it was yours.
A deep, unexplainable dread washed over him. He reached out, but there was no ground, no walls—just the void. It wasn't real. It couldn't be.
His heartbeat quickened, and a rush of memories flooded his mind—fragments of a story. A novel he'd been writing. The characters. The academy. Kaien Lior, the character who was meant to be a disposable side figure, a mere passing element of the plot. A character who was destined to die before Chapter 13.
The weight of realization hit him like a freight train.
This was not a dream. This was not some afterlife. He was Kaien Lior—the character he had created and left unfinished.
The author had become the written.
He felt a sudden pull, a tug in the back of his mind as if some force were guiding him, dragging him towards a new reality, a world that existed outside of his control.
The story was real.
And he, Kaien, had no idea what the next line would hold.
The world around him flickered—just like the text on a screen. The words began to shift, ever so slightly. He blinked, unsure whether it was his imagination or something deeper at work. And there, in the faint glow of nothingness, a single, ominous phrase formed:
"I am no longer the author. I am the story."
To be continued…