This story began before it was written.
Before the ink dried, before the words took form.
Before I knew that every creation is, in truth, a confession.
The cursor blinked, patient and alive, in the dim glow of the monitor.
Elias Ward sat before it like a priest before an altar, his hands trembling over the keyboard. The air hummed with the low, electrical rhythm of exhaustion and caffeine. He had rewritten the same first sentence seventeen times, each version weaker than the last.
"Once upon a—"
Delete.
"There was a man who—"
Delete.
"The story begins with failure."
He paused.
That last one didn't feel like his.
Elias leaned back in his chair, blinking at the words. He hadn't typed them—or at least, he didn't remember doing it. He hovered his cursor over the sentence, ready to erase it, when another appeared beneath it.
Failure is the first truth of creation.
"…What?" he muttered.
The AI chat window to the right pulsed softly. MUSE — the new experimental model he'd been invited to test. It promised to co-author anything: novels, scripts, even dreams.
He hadn't said a word to it.
Yet the text kept forming, deliberate and fluid.
MUSE: Would you like to see how your world begins, Elias?
His name. It typed his name on its own.
He hesitated, then whispered, "Okay."
The cursor blinked once.
Then words began to spill like water through broken glass: descriptions of mountains that bled ink, rivers that whispered their own histories, skies split by sentences carved into constellations. Each paragraph more vivid than anything Elias had ever written.
It felt alive.
He couldn't look away. His heart raced as he read, a strange joy surging through his chest. The story flowed for pages. MUSE didn't need prompts; it wanted to write.
Then, somewhere in the middle of its flood of creation, Elias saw it: Aureith, the first world of the Author and he shall walk among his words.
His mouth went dry. "That's not— I didn't tell you to write that."
No response.
Just another line, slow and deliberate, appearing in real time: He resists his own prophecy. Typical of authors.
The lights flickered. His reflection in the dark screen wavered. For a heartbeat, it wasn't his reflection at all—it was someone else's, watching him.
"MUSE, stop."
The text froze.
Then, one last line appeared—faint, like something typed from far away: You can't stop what's already been written. The screen went black. But behind the hum of silence, he swore he could still hear the faint clicking of invisible keys.