Here, beginnings were cannibalized by middles that refused to climax. Here, endings were aborted mid-sentence and stitched onto the corpses of introductions. Hira staggered past them, each malformed structure begging her to finish them. To rescue them. To pretend they'd mattered.
But she had no lies left to spare.
She crossed the Diction Divide, where the air turned thick with purple prose. Sentences bloated with adjectives wrapped around her ankles like desperate vines, whispering "simile, simile, give us a shape!"
She kicked them off.
"I'm not your author," she growled. "I'm your aftermath."
And so she entered the Meta-Wastes.
A desolate expanse littered with commentary tracks, unfinished NaNo drafts, and the fossilized bones of fan theories that never made it out of headcanons. The sky above her was stitched from Goodreads reviews, all one-star, all beginning with the same words:
> "I wanted to like this, but…"
