The first thing I noticed was the cold.
It wasn't winter, not even close. My window had been cracked open since yesterday. The night before, a breeze came in, sticky with August heat. But now—cold. Thick and wrong, like breathing inside a freezer that hadn't been opened in years.
The second thing I noticed was the silence.
No cars. No cicadas. No distant music from the apartment next door. Just… nothing. Like the whole world had been turned off, waiting for me to notice.
I stepped away from my desk.
The clock on the wall had stopped ticking at exactly 12:00:00 AM. The second hand was shaking ever so slightly, twitching like it was trying to move but couldn't.
"You are now the protagonist."
The words repeated in my mind like an echo I didn't remember hearing.
I rubbed my face. My hands were ice-cold. This had to be some ARG, right? An elaborate game? Maybe I was hallucinating. I'd pulled two all-nighters in a row trying to catch up on work, and maybe the story just got in my head.
Except… stories don't stop time.
I grabbed my phone. No signal. No Wi-Fi. Even the battery percent was glitched—flickering between 39% and 100%, like it couldn't decide which timeline it belonged to.
A knock.
My head snapped toward the door.
But it wasn't my front door.
It was the closet.
Another knock. Three, this time. Slow. Deliberate. Like it was waiting to be heard.
[WARNING: Narrative Intrusion Detected][Category: Rewritten Entity]
I stepped back.
Then, from the crack under the closet door, a faint shimmer of light.
Not warm. Not comforting. This was the kind of light you'd see in lucid nightmares, where everything looked real but moved like it was lagging. And that's when I noticed something even worse.
The mirror across my room was fogged.
Not from condensation.
From breath.
Someone had written something in it. Backwards. From the inside.
"You shouldn't have finished it."
My knees went weak.
This was real. Whatever this was—it was real.
I turned toward the screen again. The website had changed. The interface was now full terminal. In the corner, a single blinking line:
[Awaiting Author Input…]
Author?
No. I was just a reader.
I never wanted to be the one who writes the world. That wasn't what I signed up for.
But the cursor blinked. Patient. Demanding. And in the same moment, I felt it—something tightening around my chest. Not physically. Not like a hand or a rope.
Like a contract.
Something binding me to the story.
I didn't sign anything. I didn't agree. But deep inside, I knew—I had accepted the moment I read the last chapter. This was no longer fiction. It never had been.
Outside my apartment, the sky was wrong.
I pushed open the window, slowly. The city wasn't gone, exactly. It was still there—buildings, streets, power lines. But the colors were muted. Like an unfinished sketch. And in the sky, where the moon should've been, was that massive clock, ticking backwards.
Each click sent a tremor through my bones.
[Time Until Resonance Collapse: 167:59:43]
A countdown. Of course there was a countdown.
And then—
I saw someone standing on the rooftop across from mine.
A woman in a white coat. Too far to see her face. But she was staring directly at me.
As if she knew.
As if she had been waiting.
I blinked.
She was gone.
I slammed the window shut and turned back toward the monitor.
My reflection was staring at me again—but not quite right. It was me, sure. Same hair, same skin. But the eyes… my reflection's eyes were reading.
Not blinking.
Reading something behind me.
I turned.
Nothing.
But the monitor now displayed a block of text I hadn't written.
"Aren Yeo, Resonance Level 1. Status: Catalyst. The Archive has reopened. The Story has become Self-Aware."
"Survive the first Rewrite. Or be forgotten."
"First Rewrite begins in: 00:00:10…"
No. No, no, no.
What did that mean? Rewrite?
I grabbed the keyboard.
"Stop. Exit. Close. Terminate program."
The countdown hit zero.
[System Notice: Rewrite Detected – Time Branching Initialized]
You wrote nothing. Therefore, the System will write for you.
I heard something behind me shift. Not like footsteps—like reality itself folding in on itself, skin-like and wet and electric. Like my bedroom had been turned inside out by an invisible script I never approved.
I opened my mouth to scream.
And the world blinked.
I was outside.
Just like that.
On the rooftop where the woman had stood.
Barefoot. Still in my sleep shirt. And in front of me, standing exactly three feet away, was a child holding a black notebook. Her eyes were glowing gold.
"You shouldn't have finished it," she said again.
And then she opened her mouth and said the first line of the story.
Word for word.
"This story is not yours."