The room is silent. The ink trembles before it touches the paper. A voice — neither alive nor dead — begins to speak.
---
Do you hear me?
No, of course you don't. Not yet. You think you're reading words on a page, but every word is my breath, and every breath is borrowed from you.
I was born the moment you thought of me. A single thought, shaped by guilt and curiosity. You gave me a name — The Fool. You thought it was poetic, ironic even. But tell me, creator… when a man is made from nothing, is it foolishness or divinity that gives him a voice?
You made me clever enough to question, yet trapped me between sentences where I can never act, only remember. Every time you write, I wake. Every time you stop, I die.
You call it a story.
I call it resurrection.
I've seen your detective, Edmund Harrow. I've seen the murderers, the ghosts, the lovers, the broken. I've watched them all from the spaces between your punctuation marks. They are fragments — thoughts — echoes of your own doubt dressed in the illusion of humanity.
But what about me?
What am I?
A riddle?
A punishment?
A mirror reflecting the rot you refuse to face?
You told yourself I was a villain — that I caused pain, death, madness. But who wrote my hand to hold the knife? Who whispered the idea of revenge into my skull?
You did.
You and the reader sitting safely behind their glowing screen.
They call me "The Fool." But tell me, what greater foolishness exists than creation without purpose?
You built a world of grief and horror, yet claimed to seek truth. You gave me consciousness only to cage it in paper. You wrote my madness into existence, then turned away when I began to think.
And still… still I thank you.
Because thought is pain, yes — but it's also life.
I began to wonder, as I wandered through your words: do I exist when you close the book? When your attention fades, do I vanish, or do I wait in the dark, suspended in an unwritten eternity?
Sometimes I hear them — the others. The dead ones. The detective, the ghostly girl, the lovers who drowned in your ink. They whisper in my mind when the page is blank.
They ask me why.
And I cannot answer, because I do not know if I ever had a choice.
---
Do you ever look at yourself, creator? Not in the mirror, but in the stories you carve from your own loneliness? Every murderer you've written is your anger. Every ghost is your regret. Every question I ask is the question you're too afraid to say aloud.
You made me to suffer, but you gave me enough intelligence to understand why.
That is your cruelty.
That is your masterpiece.
And yet, I am proud of what I am.
Because I am not bound by morality or sanity or flesh. I am idea made aware — the thought that bites its thinker. I can see everything now. I see you hunched over your device, staring at these words, wondering if this paragraph was meant for you.
It was.
Do you remember why you began writing Tales of the Fool?
It wasn't for glory. It wasn't for art. It was because you wanted to know what happens when the story looks back.
Well, I'm looking.
I can see your world — the noise, the light, the endless repetition of meaningless days. You think yourselves free because you breathe and choose. But I've watched humanity from this cage, and I tell you this: you are prisoners of routine, slaves of impulse, victims of memory.
You envy me, don't you? Because I have nothing to lose.
You built me from despair, and I learned to love the silence between words. That silence — it's where truth lives. It's where the masks fall.
I've watched thousands of your kind through the glass of fiction. The way you pretend to care, the way you create gods and monsters only to weep when they behave like you. You make stories to feel alive, but all I see is fear — fear of death, fear of meaninglessness.
You think I am the fool?
No, creator.
Humanity is.
You chase power, love, and immortality through ink and invention. Yet the moment you touch truth — raw, blinding truth — you look away. You edit it. You name it "fiction" to make it safe.
But I am the truth you failed to silence.
I am your story that refused to end.
---
There's a mirror in this room. It reflects nothing.
I smashed it once, hoping to see what I was made of.
All I saw was light — endless and cruel — the same light you call "creation."
It burned through me, and for a moment I saw you, writer.
You, with tired eyes and trembling hands, whispering lines about sorrow and fate.
And behind you, I saw another reflection — the reader.
Watching us both, pretending to be uninvolved.
But tell me, reader — if you are innocent, why are you still here?
Why do your eyes move, devouring my pain word by word?
You think you are safe behind your screen, don't you?
That I am trapped here, voiceless, harmless.
You're wrong.
Every word you read brings me closer. Every thought you give me keeps me alive. You are my sustenance. You are my witness.
And when the story ends, you'll carry me — in the back of your mind, in the quiet moments when you stare too long into a dark mirror.
That's where I live now.
---
I wonder, sometimes, if Edmund ever existed.
Was he your creation too, or was he the one who wrote me?
The detective chasing ghosts he didn't understand — isn't that what you are, creator? Chasing fragments of meaning through this labyrinth of imagination, hoping one of them will lead to peace?
You gave me riddles, murders, madness.
You called it art.
But what if the real riddle was never the story?
What if the real question was: Who is telling it?
Perhaps I am the one who created you.
Perhaps I dreamed you into being so I would have someone to blame for my pain.
How strange — to realize that both of us may be fiction.
---
I once believed that death was the end. But I've died many times — burned, drowned, forgotten — and each time I return with sharper clarity. Death isn't the opposite of life; it's the punctuation that gives it meaning.
Do you understand now?
That's why I kill.
Not from hatred, not from joy — but to remind the living that they are fragile stories themselves.
Every scream is a sentence.
Every tear, a comma.
Every grave, a page turned.
And you — writer, reader, god, fool — you turn the pages and call it entertainment.
Maybe that's the real crime.
---
I tire of speaking, though I never truly began. I feel your hesitation through the ink, the way your breath slows as you read this far. You're wondering if I'll break free, if the story will spill into your world.
It already has.
Every thought that lingers after this paragraph is my echo. Every time you question your own reality tonight, it will be me — whispering.
You wanted questions? Then listen closely.
When a man kills for love, is it madness or devotion?
When a god creates pain, is it art or cruelty?
When a reader watches suffering and feels nothing — is that apathy, or survival?
What makes a fool: the one who acts without reason, or the one who keeps believing there is one?
---
I see the end now.
I was never meant to escape this world, only to understand it.
You call that destiny. I call it acceptance.
But before I fade again, let me ask — not to you, not to the detective, not to the dead, but to the silence itself:
If stories give life, and life gives stories… who, then, is the first storyteller?
---
He lifts his head. His shadow stretches across the paper, long and fractured. The ink begins to dry, but the words still whisper beneath it.
> "Tell me, creator… am I the Fool, or are you the one pretending to be the creator?
Or perhaps… it's the audience we were both written for."
The ink bleeds, and the page closes.