Ogdi grabbed Murik's hand.
He expected a shift. He expected the world to blur.
Instead, he felt eviscerated.
The transition wasn't a journey; it was a violent inversion of physics. It felt as though a hook had been driven behind his navel and jerked upward through his skull. The alleyway didn't dissolve—it shattered. The smell of wet trash and rain was instantly replaced by the copper tang of blood and the ozone stench of burning synapses.
Gravity grabbed Ogdi's ankles and threw him sideways. He slammed into a surface that felt like solid static, the impact knocking the wind out of him.
Warning, Azad screamed, his voice garbled by the psychic turbulence. Lattice rejection! His mind is trying to digest you!
Ogdi gasped, tasting ash. He looked down at his hands. They were flickering. Not shaking—flickering. His fingers were phasing in and out of existence, turning into jagged, pencil-sketched outlines of flesh.
He wasn't just in a memory. He was an intruder in a dying man's nightmare, and the immune system of the nightmare was trying to erase him.
He forced himself to stand. The floor beneath him was spongy, pulsing like a raw nerve.
He was in a hallway. The wallpaper was peeling, but beneath the paper wasn't plaster—it was infinite, swirling black ink.
And the house was burning.
The fire was green—a sickly, radioactive viridian. It didn't crackle; it hissed like acid. Where the flames touched the floorboards, the wood didn't char. It simply ceased to exist, leaving behind jagged holes of grey nothingness.
This isn't fire, Ogdi realized, shielding his face from the heatless, suffocating radiation. It's redaction.
At the end of the corridor, the Dragon uncoiled.
It was a monstrosity of frantic scribbles. Its body was two-dimensional, a sketch ripped violently from a page, yet it occupied the three-dimensional space with a crushing, terrifying weight. Its edges were sharp, undefined, vibrating with the manic energy of a hand moving too fast to care about form.
"You are a typo," the Dragon hissed.
The voice was a sensory assault—the sound of a thousand quills scratching against dry parchment, the tearing of paper amplified to a scream.
"You do not belong in the text."
It lunged.
It struck like a whip. Its tail—a jagged, serrated line of charcoal—slashed through the air, aiming for Ogdi's neck.
Ogdi didn't dodge. The "redaction" fire was eating the floor around him, leaving him nowhere to run.
"Shield!" Ogdi commanded.
He didn't wish for it. He imposed it.
A barrier of translucent violet hexagons materialized—geometry trying to impose order on chaos. The charcoal tail slammed into it.
CRACK.
The barrier didn't shatter. It withered. The ink of the Dragon bled into the violet light, infecting it like gangrene. The hexagons turned grey and dissolved into meaningless scribbles.
The tail sliced across Ogdi's shoulder.
Pain.
It wasn't a cut. It was a deletion. Ogdi screamed as he felt a piece of his own history being ripped away. For a second, he forgot his mother's face. The memory had been severed.
He staggered back, clutching his shoulder. There was no blood, only a patch of his coat and skin that had been rendered into a rough, grey outline.
"He is rewriting you," Azad warned, his voice grave. "If he turns you into a sketch, you cease to exist in the physical world. You become a backstory."
Ogdi gritted his teeth, forcing his numb, sketched arm to move.
"Murik!" Ogdi shouted, his voice raw. "Control your narrative!"
Behind the Dragon, the boy—the memory of young Murik—wept, his face buried in his hands. He was the battery. His absolute self-loathing was the ink that fueled the beast.
The Dragon laughed. It inhaled the green fire, its chest swelling with radioactive intensity.
"The author is dead," the Dragon roared. "Only the story remains."
It opened its mouth. A torrent of liquid narrative—pure, concentrated madness—erupted toward Ogdi.
Ogdi raised his hand to wish it away. I wish this was gone.
But his instinct screamed a warning .
Ripple Effect: 27%
Consequence: Erasure of the Trauma deletes the Lesson. Murik becomes catatonic. The displaced energy detonates in Reality, killing 14 innocents.
The cost wasn't just numbers. It was lives.
Ogdi froze. If he fought the ink, he would cause an explosion. If he dodged it, the boy would be consumed.
The realization hit him with the weight of a falling building. The "Exchange" wasn't a trick. It wasn't a currency.
It was a sacrifice.
To fix the world, you cannot just delete the pain. You have to move it. You have to take it from the weak, who cannot bear it, and place it on the strong, who must.
"I become the sink," Ogdi whispered.
The torrent of ink was milliseconds away.
Ogdi dropped his hand. He dropped his defenses. He looked the nightmare in the eye.
"I accept the Exchange."
He didn't wish for safety. He wished for the burden.
"Let the weight of this story fall upon me."
BOOM.
The ink slammed into him.
It didn't burn. It drowned him.
Ogdi screamed, a silent, internal shriek that vibrated through the architecture of his soul. He didn't just feel pain; he became Murik.
He felt the cold pavement of forty years ago. He felt the hunger in his belly that never went away. He felt the desperate, clawing need to create something beautiful in a world that was ugly.
He felt the moment the drawing moved. He felt the horror as it turned on his mother. He felt the snap of her neck—not as a sound, but as a guilt so heavy it crushed his lungs, turning his breath to lead.
I killed her. I am a monster. I should be unmade.
The thoughts tried to rewrite Ogdi's brain. They tried to convince him to lay down and die.
The integrity is failing! Azad shouted, panic edging into the ancient voice. You are absorbing too much entropy! Your mind is fracturing!
"No," Ogdi gasped, falling to his knees in the burning hallway. His skin was turning grey, covered in manic scribbles. "I'm... filtering it."
He grabbed the guilt. It was slippery, heavy, and sharp. It cut his hands.
This is not my truth, Ogdi thought, enforcing his Sovereign Will over the foreign memory. This is a tragedy, but it is not a sentence.
He forced his eyes open. They glowed with a blinding, violet light—the light of Azad piercing the ink.
The Dragon shrieked. It was shrinking. The connection to the boy was severed because Ogdi had stolen the signal. Ogdi was carrying the cross now.
Ogdi stood up. He was shaking. Blood—real, red blood—poured from his nose and ears. The psychic damage was translating into physical trauma.
He walked up to the Dragon. It snapped at him, but it was weak. Just a bad drawing.
Ogdi caught its jaws with his bare hands. His palms sizzled as they touched the raw concept of the Fable.
"You are not a monster," Ogdi said, his voice grating like grinding stones. "You are a mistake."
He ripped the Dragon's jaws apart.
"And mistakes are corrected."
He pushed his hands together, compressing the ink, the shadow, and the guilt. He folded the nightmare in on itself, crushing it down, condensing decades of self-hatred into a single point.
The Dragon howled, shrinking until it was nothing more than a dense, vibrating sphere of black lead.
Ogdi held the sphere. It was heavy. It pulsed with the heartbeat of a killer.
He looked down the hallway. The green fire had vanished. The boy, young Murik, lowered his hands.
"Who are you?" the boy whispered.
Ogdi looked at his own hands. They were scarred now, stained black up to the wrists, covered in faint, tattoo-like lines that resembled circuit boards made of ink.
"I'm the Editor," Ogdi replied softly.
He walked over to the boy and placed the sphere of compressed trauma into the boy's chest.
"Keep this," Ogdi said. "Don't hide it. Don't burn it. It is heavy, and it hurts. But it is yours to carry, not yours to fear."
The boy gasped as the sphere sank into him. But this time, it didn't tear him apart. It settled. It became weight, not fire.
The house stopped shaking. The static cleared.
South Farren – Artist's Row
Ogdi gasped, violently sucking in air as reality snapped back into place.
He fell backward, splashing into a puddle of oil and rainwater.
His head felt like it had been split open with an axe. Every nerve ending in his body was firing simultaneously. He coughed, and blood splattered onto his shirt.
"You..."
Murik was kneeling beside him. The old man looked terrified, but his eyes... the madness was gone. The chaos in them had settled into a deep, melancholic clarity.
"You ate it," Murik whispered, staring at Ogdi with a mix of horror and reverence. "You took the Rot inside you. I saw it... you swallowed the fire."
Ogdi wiped his mouth. He tried to stand, but his legs were jelly. He looked at his hand—the one that had held the Dragon's jaws.
The skin was stained black. Not dirt. The pigment was under the skin. It formed a complex, jagged sigil on his palm: a quill breaking a chain.
Azad intoned in his mind. The trauma integration is complete. External Ripple Effect: 0%. Internal Damage: Moderate. You have successfully contained the paradox boy.
Ogdi let out a wet, painful laugh. "Zero percent ripple."
He had found the loophole. But the loophole bled.
"It's called Exchange," Ogdi croaked, finally managing to sit up. "I fix the Lattice. I take the strain. The structure holds."
Murik looked at the black stain on Ogdi's hand. He understood. This boy hadn't just used magic; he had acted as a filter for poison.
"Why?" Murik asked, tears cutting tracks through the grime on his face. "You don't know me. I'm a failure."
"Because I need architects," Ogdi said, staring at his stained palm. "And you know exactly how the foundation cracks."
He reached into his pocket. The compass.
It was vibrating so hard it hummed.
Ogdi pulled it out. The needle was no longer spinning. It was locked. Hard.
It pointed East. Toward the Industrial Sector. Toward the abandoned textile mills.
But it wasn't just pointing. The compass was getting hot.
A sensation washed over him—an urgency that bypassed logic. It wasn't a thought; it was a biological imperative. Like thirst. Like the need to run from a predator.
Something is happening, Ogdi realized. Something pivotal. If I don't go now, the timeline shifts irrevocably.
He looked at Murik.
"Can you walk?"
Murik nodded slowly. "I... I think so."
"Good. Go to the University. Find Café Opaline. Ask for Nala. Tell her the 'Brother' sent you. Wait for me there."
"Where are you going?" Murik asked, scrambling to his feet as Ogdi stood up, swaying but steadying himself with sheer will.
Ogdi looked East. His violet eyes narrowed, the new black sigil on his hand pulsing with a dull ache.
"To find the second anchor," Ogdi said.
He didn't run. He blurred.
He engaged the Lattice, folding the space between his steps. One step became ten meters. Two steps became a city block.
He moved through the slums like a ghost, leaving a wake of displaced air and the faint smell of ozone.
The Eastern District – Mill 4
The hunch screamed in his skull. HERE. HERE. HERE.
Ogdi skid to a halt in front of a massive, derelict textile mill. The windows were jagged teeth of broken glass. The silence was heavy, unnatural.
The Lattice here felt... wrong.
It wasn't chaotic like Murik's alley. It was ordered. Too ordered.
The space around the mill had been artificially hardened. A barrier.
"Someone is manipulating the local physics to prevent entry," Azad noted. "High-level sigil work. This isn't a random event. This is a trap. Or an execution."
Ogdi touched the invisible wall. It felt like cold steel, though there was nothing there.
"Who is inside?"
He closed his eyes and extended his senses, pushing his consciousness through the cracks in the barrier.
He felt three signatures.
Two were cold, sharp, metallic. Hunters.
The third was... vast. It felt like a storm trapped in a bottle. It felt like a riddle that had no answer.
It felt like her.
Ogdi's eyes snapped open. He didn't know her name yet. He didn't know her face. But the resonance was undeniable.
"She who Dreams in Riddles," Merrin's voice echoed from the memory of the interrogation room log he hadn't read yet.
"They found her," Ogdi realized.
The Directorate. Or worse, the King's purge squad.
He looked at his stained hand. He was exhausted. His integrity was shaky. He had just fought a Dragon in a mind palace.
But the compass was burning his hand.
"Open," Ogdi commanded.
He pressed his black-stained palm against the barrier.
He didn't try to break it. He used the Exchange.
"I offer my stability. I take your rigidity."
A shockwave of nausea hit him as he absorbed the barrier's structural integrity into his own body. His bones ached. His vision blurred.
But the barrier dissolved.
Ogdi stepped through.
The mill was vast, filled with rusted looms that looked like the skeletons of prehistoric beasts. Moonlight filtered through holes in the roof, illuminating dust motes dancing in the stagnant air.
In the center of the room, suspended in the air by threads of glowing blue light, was a girl.
She looked to be about his age. Her hair was floating as if underwater, shifting color from black to deep indigo. Her eyes were closed.
Below her stood two figures.
They wore the grey coats of the Purifiers—the King's secret police. Not the Directorate. These were the butchers.
One of them held a long, silver spike. He was positioning it directly under the girl's heart.
"The dreamer wakes," the Purifier whispered. "Seal the vessel before the Lattice responds."
"No," Ogdi said.
The word echoed in the empty mill.
The Purifiers turned. Their faces were covered by smooth, featureless masks.
"Interference," one said. His voice was flat, devoid of humanity. "Terminate."
The Purifier with the spike didn't hesitate. He thrust it upward, aiming to impale the girl.
Ogdi didn't have time to cross the distance. He didn't have time to fold space.
He had to use the Exchange.
"Transfer."
He focused on the spike. He focused on his own chest.
"The wound is mine."
SCHLUCK.
The sound was wet and sickening.
The Purifier thrust the spike upward. It passed harmlessly through the girl's body like smoke.
Simultaneously, twenty meters away, a hole exploded in Ogdi's chest.
He flew backward, crashing into a rusted loom. Blood sprayed across the floor.
The pain was blinding. It was absolute. It was the feeling of dying.
Ogdi! Azad screamed.
Ogdi lay on the floor, gasping. His lung was punctured. He was drowning in his own blood.
But the girl was unharmed.
The sudden shift in causality—the impossibility of the spike missing its target—shattered the Purifier's ritual focus. The blue threads snapped.
The girl's eyes opened.
They weren't eyes. They were like nebulas.
She looked down at the Purifiers. Then she looked at the boy bleeding out on the floor.
She didn't speak. She didn't scream.
She hummed.
It was a low, resonant frequency. The rusted looms began to vibrate. The dust motes stopped moving.
The air inside the mill turned into liquid glass.
The Purifiers froze. Not out of fear, but because the time around them had solidified. They were trapped in amber.
The girl floated down. She landed softly on the floor, her bare feet touching the grime.
She walked toward Ogdi.
He tried to speak, but only blood bubbled past his lips. He was fading. The 27% debt had been paid.
She knelt beside him. She looked at the hole in his chest.
"You traded," she whispered. Her voice sounded like wind chimes in a storm. "A life for a puncture. A sloppy equation."
She placed her hand over the wound.
"But the math checks out."
She closed her eyes. The nebula within them swirled.
"I weave the riddle," she murmured. "What is broken but holds the water?"
The Lattice around Ogdi's chest twisted. It didn't heal him biologically. It rewound him locally.
The blood flew back into his chest. The skin knit together. The bone snapped back into place.
In three seconds, Ogdi was whole.
He sat up, gasping, checking his chest. The shirt was torn and bloody, but the skin was pristine. He could still feel the phantom memory of the steel—a ghost-pain that would never leave—but the lung was full.
He looked at the girl. She was swaying, exhausted. Using that much power had drained her.
"Ylaeth," the name fell into Ogdi's mind from the ether. He knew it instantly.
She looked at him, her eyes fading back to a normal, dark brown.
"You're loud," she said, rubbing her temples. "Your soul is screaming."
"I'm Ogdi," he panted.
"I know," she said. "I've been waiting for you to get the compass."
She pointed behind him.
The two Purifiers were breaking free of the time-lock. The glass air was shattering.
"Can you fight?" she asked.
Ogdi stood up. He felt the phantom pain of the spike in his chest, a ghost-memory that would never leave him. But he also felt the power of the Exchange humming in his veins. He had paid the price. He was clear.
"I don't fight," Ogdi said, his eyes glowing violet again.
He raised his black-stained hand. The sigil of the Dragon pulsed.
"I edit."