The scent of ozone and cooling blood was the first thing to greet Olivia each dawn. It was a perfume she had come to associate with rebirth, a cloying, metallic tang that clung to the back of her throat and promised another day of slaughter. She opened her eyes.
Above, a sky of bruised purple and impossible constellations swirled around a sun that was neither white nor yellow, but the stark, flat grey of a dead cinder. Below, the cobblestones of the Gilded Cage, today's battlefield, were slick with a dew that might have been water, or might have been the weeping of the ancient stones themselves. Her own body, rent asunder by a crystalline spear just yesterday, felt whole again. The phantom pain in her chest where her heart had been skewered was a familiar ghost, a dull ache that served as her only memory of the previous cycle's end.
This was the promise and the curse of Aethelburg, the Endless Tournament. Every warrior who died in its shifting arenas was reborn at the next dawn, their wounds erased, their minds intact, doomed to fight forever.
A low growl echoed from the far end of the alley she had awoken in. Olivia didn't flinch. She rose slowly, her movements economical, her gaze sweeping the narrow space. Her attire was simple, functional leather armour over worn trousers and a tunic, a stark contrast to the baroque, impossible panoply worn by many of the Tournament's veterans. In a place where death was a temporary inconvenience, practicality had become a forgotten virtue.
Her weapon, a short, unassuming sword, lay beside her. She picked it up, its weight a familiar comfort in her hand. It was not a grand weapon, forged in dragon's fire or imbued with the souls of vanquished kings. It was a tool. And Olivia was a craftsman.
The growl grew louder, and a figure shambled into the bruised light. It was one of the 'Hollowed'—a warrior who had died one too many times, whose mind had finally fractured under the strain of endless resurrection. Its eyes were vacant, its movements jerky, its Aspect running rampant and uncontrolled. This one's skin shimmered with a sickly, oily light, the Manifestation of a debased Aspect of Corrosive Light. Beams of this foul energy dripped from its fingertips, sizzling and eating away at the cobblestones.
Most combatants would have charged, eager for the first kill of the day. Olivia stood her ground. Her eyes unfocused for a fraction of a second as she activated her own power, her Animus stirring within her soul. She possessed the Aspect of the Unwritten Page.
To others, the world was a chaotic mess of action and reaction. To Olivia, it was a story waiting to be written. She did not see a charging monster; she saw a narrative unfolding. The Hollowed's lunge was a crude sentence, full of rage but devoid of grammar. The sizzling light was a clumsy metaphor for pain.
And every story, no matter how chaotic, had plot holes.
Instead of meeting the charge, Olivia took a sharp step to her left. Her perception of the world shifted. She saw the threads of causality, the faint, shimmering lines of what could be. The Hollowed's charge had a story—a beginning (the growl), a middle (the lunge), and a pre-written end (impact with her body). But Olivia's power was to find the unwritten possibilities, the edits that could be made in the margins of reality.
Her eyes darted to the wall beside her. It was a tapestry of narrative potential. A loose brick screamed its desire to fall. The memory of a long-evaporated puddle whispered of slickness. A rusty grate spoke of a structural weakness from a battle a thousand cycles ago.
She didn't need superhuman strength or reality-bending spells. She just needed to be a good editor.
As the Hollowed lunged, its corrosive claws outstretched, Olivia's foot pressed down on a specific cobblestone. It wasn't a trigger for a trap, not in the conventional sense. It was an inciting incident. Her pressure, combined with the alley's inherent narrative, created a new sentence in the story of the moment.
The loose brick, its potential finally realized, tumbled from the wall. It was a small thing, insignificant. But it landed on the edge of the rusty grate, the perfect, unforeseen complication. The grate, its weakness now a part of the active narrative, buckled.
The Hollowed's foot, meant to propel it forward, instead plunged into the newly opened hole. Its momentum, the climax of its simple story, was violently re-routed. The creature pitched forward, its scything claws missing Olivia by a hair's breadth and embedding themselves in the opposite wall with a shriek of tortured stone.
For a moment, it was trapped, its own clumsy narrative having written it into a corner.
Olivia did not waste the opportunity. She moved with a fluid grace, her short sword a blur. She did not aim for the head or the heart. Such wounds were meaningless here. She aimed for the plot points.
Her blade traced a precise line across the creature's back, severing not muscle and bone, but the very connection between the Hollowed's Animus and its physical form. To an outside observer, it would look like a shallow cut. But to Olivia, she was excising the key verb from the sentence of its existence.
The oily light flickered and died. The Hollowed slumped, its body not dead, but inert. It would lie there until the next "slaughter," the mysterious force that reset the arena at the end of each day.
Olivia did not feel triumph. She felt a quiet, gnawing sorrow. Another soul trapped in this endless, pointless story.
She had entered the Endless Tournament willingly, a feat most believed impossible. She had not come for glory, or power, or the thrill of eternal battle. She had come for answers. Six months ago, her younger brother, Leo, had vanished from their world. All that was left behind was a single, impossible artifact: a Rebirth Token, the very thing that bound the warriors to Aethelburg. It was a key, and Olivia had used it to unlock the cage from the outside and walk in.
Her purpose was twofold. First, find Leo. In a city of hundreds of thousands of combatants, spread across ever-shifting arenas, this was a monumental task. She had only the slimmest of leads: whispers of a boy with an Aspect of Unwavering Hope, a power so strange in this cynical hell that it was spoken of in hushed, disbelieving tones.
Her second purpose was far more ambitious. She intended to read the story of Aethelburg itself. Who was the author of this eternal torment? What was the syntax of its magic? And most importantly, how did the story end? She believed the answers were not in the fighting, but in the world itself—in the architecture that sometimes appeared for a single day before vanishing, in the patterns of the arena's shifts, in the ramblings of the Ancients who had been fighting since the first page was written.
Her Aspect, the Unwritten Page, was her only true weapon. It was weak in direct combat. She could not conjure fire or shatter stone. But she could perceive the narrative of the world, and with enough insight, she believed she could find its final chapter and force an ending.
Wiping her blade, she stepped out of the alley and into the main plaza of the Gilded Cage. Ornate, gold-leafed buildings stretched towards the cinder-grey sun. A grand clock tower with no hands stood in the center, a monument to the meaninglessness of time in this place. Warriors were already engaged in combat, a whirlwind of impossible powers clashing against one another. A man whose body was a swarm of sentient insects battled a woman who could fold space into razor-sharp edges. A hulking brute with the Aspect of Unyielding Granite traded blows with a duelist who moved like a flicker of lightning.
Olivia's gaze swept over them all. They were characters, trapped in their own violent subplots. She was the reader, and the editor. And she would scour this entire, cursed manuscript until she found the two things she sought: her brother, and the name of the author.