But here's the part they never tell you.
The story doesn't stop when you stop writing.
It waits.
And when it waits too long—when it grows starved of ink, of skin, of bone—it begins to write you.
One morning, you wake to find your hands already moving. Not toward a pen. Not toward a keyboard.
Toward your own body.
You scratch a phrase into your thigh. Absentmindedly. Like doodling in the margins of a notebook. Except the words stay. They welt. They pulse.
> "Chapter One: Reentry."
You try to wash them off. But water doesn't touch them. It absorbs into them.
And the mirror?
It doesn't reflect you anymore.
It reflects the draft you swore never existed.
Not just the story.
But the raw footage. The first thought. The forbidden memory. The thing you didn't even know had a shape.
Until now.
Until it stood behind your shoulder in the glass and whispered:
> "We're almost there."
You don't remember going to the basement. You don't have a basement.
And yet—
You're there.
