The Chosen Teacher
Cipher is not a knight, nor a chosen hero, but a teacher—a man burdened with the task of guiding others to strength rather than claiming glory for himself. Yet the world he walks is anything but ordinary. It is a land where stories themselves are alive, looping endlessly, devouring those trapped inside them.
Fairy tales, myths, and legends do not simply fade into memory when told. They persist, hungry to be reenacted, demanding their endings again and again. And those caught within are doomed to play their parts—until death closes the book, only for it to open once more.
Cipher, armed with a runed scythe and guided by a strange mechanical companion, travels between these tales. His purpose is not to slay every beast or save every victim, but to break the tyranny of narrative inevitability. To give those inside a chance to live beyond the script.
But his defiance does not go unnoticed. Shadows called the Fades—watchers, enforcers, and reminders of how “the story must go”—haunt his every step. They whisper the endings into the ears of the doomed. They warp forests, bend houses, and shape monsters to keep tales on track. They are both chorus and jailors.
Cipher’s journey begins with Red Riding Hood, but her tale is only the first thread pulled loose from a greater tapestry. There are other children, other stories, other Wolves. Each tale resists change, and each carries its own monstrous incarnation of inevitability: a Beast that insists on its script being fulfilled.
Yet Cipher’s mission is more than mercy. Each story he bends ripples outward, weakening the hold of the narrative across the world. The Gods themselves—distant, fractured voices tied to creation—offer glimpses of truth: stories are not chains unless people believe they must be. To break one story is to challenge the order of all stories. And that is a dangerous act.
As Cipher and those who begin to follow him carve new paths, they draw closer to a terrible realization:
The Fades are not mere monsters. They are the audience. They are the echo of us, the watchers who demand tragedy, who hunger for endings, who consume stories without thought of the lives inside them.
To free the world, Cipher must face not only the myths and the Fades, but also the very hunger of story itself. A hunger that will never stop unless someone teaches it—like he taught his students — a life is more than its ending.
