Chapter 10: The Pen That Wrote Before Time
> "You think you're writing to remember.
But the truth is—you're writing to keep forgetting."
— Found etched into the spine of the pen
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He woke up.
Or thought he did.
He was back in his room.
The walls were cracked, humming with invisible static.
The light flickered like it was unsure of its purpose.
On the desk: the notebook.
Open.
But the ink was still moving — letters reshaping, crawling across the page like insects of thought.
And beside it: a pen he had never seen before.
It looked like a needle made of obsidian and bone, warm to the touch, as if it remembered fingers that held it centuries ago.
He picked it up.
It resisted at first.
Then... it pulsed.
And with that pulse, images bled into his mind — not memories, not dreams — more like whispers from a time that had no calendar:
A desert where shadows moved without light.
A man with no face writing on the sky.
A screaming mouth sealed with thousands of names.
Then came a phrase, seared behind his eyelids:
> "The first writer wasn't human."
He dropped the pen.
It didn't fall.
It floated, pointing at the notebook like a compass locked on a secret.
The next page turned on its own.
At the top, a title had already appeared:
> "Chapter 11 — Written by Something Else"
Ranzō stared.
His hand moved involuntarily.
The pen returned to his grip.
And he wrote...
Not his words.
Not his thoughts.
Something was using him.
But part of him wanted it.
As if he was finally becoming what he was always meant to be:
a passage.
A vessel.
A rewritten idea.
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> The pen doesn't choose the hand.
It chooses the mind willing to vanish.
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