Salem woke to silence.
Not the peaceful kind. The wrong kind—the silence that hums, alive and watching.
His eyes opened to white. Blinding white. No walls, no ceiling, no floor—just endless whiteness stretching in every direction like the inside of a blank page. His body felt weightless, unanchored.
For a fleeting second, he thought he was dead.
Then the text appeared.
[DRAFT 26: INITIALIZING…]
The letters hung in the air, black and sharp against the white void. Salem blinked. Rubbed his eyes. Still there. Floating like smug little gods.
"…Okay. No. Nope. Not doing this."
He turned—except there was nothing to turn toward. Just more white. He picked a direction anyway and started walking, boots echoing on nothing.
The text followed.
[PROCESSING CHARACTER DATA…]
[WARNING: PROTAGONIST NONCOMPLIANT.]
"Oh, screw you," he snapped, swiping at the words like they were flies. His fingers passed through empty air.
[SASS DETECTED.]
[ENABLING CONSEQUENCES.]
The temperature dropped. His breath fogged. And then—out of the whiteness—came the sound.
Footsteps.
Slow, deliberate, heavy.
Salem froze. "Hello?"
No answer. Just the steps, growing louder.
And then he saw them.
Figures. Dozens of them, emerging from the blank space like ink bleeding through paper. Men, women, children—faces blurred, limbs stiff. They shuffled closer, silent except for their dragging feet. Their skin wasn't skin at all—it was words. Sentences and paragraphs crawled over their bodies like tattoos, black letters twisting as they moved.
Salem's stomach dropped.
Characters.
Dead characters.
The ones who didn't make it into the final draft.
One of them—a tall man with half a jaw missing—lurched forward and spoke. Except it wasn't a voice. It was typewriter clacks, echoing in Salem's skull.
"HE CUT US. HE ERASED US."
Another joined in, her body trembling as entire paragraphs slithered across her arms.
"WE WERE PROMISED STORIES. HE LIED."
Salem stumbled back. "Who? Who lied?"
They all turned to him. Dozens of hollow eyes, ink dripping from their sockets like tears. And in perfect, horrific unison, they said:
"THE WRITER."
A chill tore down his spine.
The white void trembled. More text appeared overhead.
[QUERY: SHOULD THE PROTAGONIST JOIN THE DELETED?]
"Nope. Nope nope nope." Salem bolted, sprinting into the blank infinity. The sound of dragging feet followed, faster now, the whispers rising like a storm. Pages flapped in the distance—massive, endless sheets of paper descending from nowhere, slamming into the ground like walls.
He turned a corner that shouldn't exist and nearly collided with a desk.
A single desk. In the middle of the void.
And behind it sat… her.
The receptionist from the Narrative Department. Except now her smile was cracked, literally—splintered like porcelain, shards peeling from her cheeks. She held a pen dripping with black ink that never hit the desk, defying gravity.
"Tsk, tsk," she said sweetly, voice echoing like it came from inside his skull. "Running from your edits, Salem? That's adorable."
He skidded to a stop, chest heaving. "What the hell is going on?!"
She leaned forward, grin widening to an inhuman stretch.
"Final draft review. You didn't read the fine print, did you?"
The void around them warped. The dead characters closed in, their bodies twitching, sentences spilling from their mouths like smoke. One reached out, brushing Salem's arm—letters crawled onto his skin, burning like fire.
"JOIN US."
Salem ripped his arm away, panic clawing at his throat.
"I'm not like you!"
"No," the receptionist purred, "you're worse. You think you have control. You think you matter. But you're just ink, Salem. You always were."
His fists clenched. "You think I'm just going to roll over and let him delete me?"
She tilted her head. "Who said anything about deleting?"
The ground split open beneath his feet. From the darkness below, hands shot out—made of paper and ink, clawing for him. The void filled with the sound of tearing pages, endless, deafening.
[APPLYING REVISION…]
The words flashed above him in crimson.
"NO!" Salem roared, grabbing at the desk as the paper hands dragged him down. His nails scraped wood, splintering it, but the receptionist only watched with lazy amusement.
"Good luck in the margins, protagonist."
The last thing he saw before the void swallowed him was her smile—and the pen hovering over a blank page, poised to rewrite him from scratch.
---
And then, silence.
When Salem opened his eyes, the world was different.
Not white. Not void.
A bustling city—familiar yet wrong, neon signs glitching in midair, people walking backward, rain falling upward.
And across the street, sitting at a café table, sipping coffee like this was all perfectly normal…
Was himself.
Not a reflection. Not an illusion.
Another Salem.
Who looked up, smirked, and said:
"Took you long enough to get here."