> "You rewrote the page before the Author flipped it."
— Kairoz, Custodian of Unstable Realms
---
The world didn't just pause.
It… unthreaded.
A stillness deeper than silence slid its fingers through the clearing, plucking time like a harp string stretched too tight. The wind halted mid-whistle. The drifting remnants of the Guardian—burnt pages and broken letters—hung midair, like a sentence held between breaths.
Even Ereze, whose instincts bordered on prophetic, froze mid-step. Not like she stopped moving—but like she had been unwritten momentarily. The Tower, for once, didn't speak. It listened.
And then—
A sound.
Not through the ears. Not through the ground.
It rang in my timeline.
A single, muted ding. Like a grandfather clock chiming in a dream you weren't supposed to remember.
Something ancient had noticed us.
---
The sky peeled open.
No lightning. No clouds. Just a long, aching rip—like fabric torn by invisible hands, revealing what lay beneath the page.
From within that gap, he floated into being.
Not walked, not descended. Just… was.
Kairoz.
Custodian of Unstable Realms.
Time rippled around him, warping reality like heat over sand. One hand dragged trails of black ink behind it, and the other unspooled a scroll that wrote itself in languages I almost remembered from nightmares.
His form shimmered—chrome dipped in constellations. A thousand miniature stars swam in his limbs, orbiting impossible points. One eye ticked forward with a visible second-hand.
The other?
A sealed book, embedded in his skull, bound with gold and silence.
He hovered sideways—never quite upright. Not a single part of him obeyed gravity.
Or story.
---
> "Hmph," he muttered, eyes scanning the aftermath like a disappointed librarian.
"Look at this mess."
His voice didn't echo. It embedded. Like someone whispering inside your past.
I couldn't move.
Not because I was stunned. Because he made it so.
Narrative Freeze.
An admin command, for lack of a better term.
I was locked out of my own character slot.
Kairoz drifted lazily through the suspended world. He studied Ereze mid-blink, examined Jiwoon frozen in a halfway scream, and finally, turned the scroll toward himself. His hand flicked through it like a reader skimming spoilers.
Names flew by in the script—
Arien. Jiwoon. Ereze.
Each with annotations. Color-coded death dates. Margin notes from unknown hands. Some marked with stars, others with lines through them.
Then—
My name.
But where others had fate…
Mine was an inkblot.
A smear.
Refusing to resolve.
Kairoz tilted his head.
> "You shouldn't exist yet."
---
He waved a hand lazily.
I gasped—voice returning like a punch to the throat. My knees buckled.
"Wh—who are you?"
> "Not your author. Not yet. I'm the one who keeps the pages from falling out of order."
His ink-dripping fingers hovered above Jiwoon.
> "Survives longer than he believes. Stronger than he thinks. Needs a better arc, though."
He pointed at Ereze.
> "Always too early. But always necessary."
Then he turned to me again, floating sideways until we were eye-level.
> "You? You flipped the page out of sequence. And you rewrote a fate before the ink dried."
The scroll vanished with a sigh of paper.
He pressed a finger to my chest—
and I felt him reading me.
Not thoughts. Not memories.
Moments.
He paused when he reached that line.
The second rewrite.
The one I shouldn't have been able to do.
And smiled.
> "That... was clever. Dangerous, but clever."
---
Behind him, the sky flickered. Other eyes stirred within the tear—distant, watching. Each gaze more vast and unknowable than the last.
Kairoz spoke softly, like a bedtime story laced with poison.
> "Chaos isn't the villain, Reader. It's seasoning. It adds flavor to the meal. But dessert before dinner?"
He clicked his fingers.
A warm pulse hit the world.
Time resumed.
Ereze gasped.
Jiwoon fell to one knee.
The shattered remains of the Corrupted Draft turned to ash and spiraled skyward, pages blanking as they vanished.
And Kairoz?
Gone.
Not faded. Just no longer written.
---
Only a message remained, burnt into the air like afterimage:
> [The Pantheon of Revision is now aware of your interference.]
"We are watching. Proceed with flavor."
---
Silence.
Then breath.
Real, ragged breath.
Ereze clutched her head. "What… was that?"
I swallowed hard.
Still shaking.
Still unsure if the ground beneath me was real.
"The editor," I said.
No one laughed.
Because we all knew, somehow, I wasn't joking.
I looked up at the rip in the sky—
—and for a split second, it blinked.
Like an eye.
Watching.
---
To be continued.