They left the well behind.
But the weight came with them.
Every step felt heavier, not in body — but in certainty. Elías no longer questioned whether the world was broken. He knew now:
It was breaking still.
---
The path turned to gravel, then to dust, then to memory.
Tirian noticed it first.
"These stones," he said, kneeling, "they remember us."
Leshra narrowed her eyes. "What?"
"Look."
She looked.
Every stone bore a footprint. But none matched their boots.
None.
Still, each step mirrored Elías's gait exactly.
Even ones ahead.
---
"We've already walked this," Elías whispered.
"But we haven't," Verrun muttered. "Not yet."
---
Then came the howling.
Not wolves.
Not wind.
Something pretending to be both.
The sound circled them — hungry, lost, nostalgic.
And then a shape appeared on the ridge.
---
A creature of flesh-ash and bone-light.
Its limbs bent wrong. Too long. Its jaw opened sideways, stretching into sound.
Behind it, more figures crawled from the rocks.
A pack.
Each worse than the last.
Some walked.
Some flew.
Some slithered using arms.
All of them had the same face: the reader's mask.
No eyes. No mouth. Just blank parchment skin stitched where identity used to be.
---
Leshra drew her blade.
"They're hunting something."
Tirian nodded.
"Elías."
---
The creatures moved as one.
No growls.
Just pages fluttering.
Their bones clicked like typewriters.
Their claws dripped ink.
---
The first leaped — not at Elías — but through him.
Or tried to.
The moment it touched his skin, it screamed.
Its body disintegrated into alphabet, melting into the ground. The others stopped mid-run.
They'd seen enough.
They lunged.
---
Battle came.
Not in fury — in ritual.
Elías didn't fight.
The feather burned in his hand, words flowing from its point before he thought them. They wrapped around the beasts, slicing reality. Each line he wrote struck like lightning carved from grammar.
Leshra fought beside him, blade spinning in arcs of precision. She cut through one creature's throat — only to find a mouth inside the neck. It bit her blade and whispered a curse in reverse.
Tirian unleashed saltfire.
Verrun spoke names — old names, forbidden ones — and one of the beasts froze, weeping syllables.
---
But they kept coming.
Endless.
Not real numbers.
Concepts of numbers.
---
Then Elías fell.
Not wounded.
Overwhelmed.
Not by fear.
By... understanding.
---
He saw it.
These weren't monsters.
They were drafts.
Unwritten possibilities.
Versions of him.
Of them.
That had been cut.
---
"Don't kill them!" Elías shouted. "They are what we might've become."
But it was too late.
Verrun crushed one with a prayer.
Tirian set another ablaze — it died chanting Elías's birth name.
Leshra stabbed the last, and it whispered:
"We just wanted to exist."
---
Silence fell.
The bodies dissolved.
Only one thing remained.
A bone.
Long. Carved. Clean.
It sang.
---
Not with melody.
With memory.
Each note it hummed revealed a moment that never happened.
A village where Elías stayed.
A wedding.
A child named Rion.
Peace.
---
And then it fell quiet.
Leshra picked it up.
"What is it?"
Elías took it gently.
"It's me."
---
They walked again.
This time slower.
Not out of fear.
Out of grief.
Each hill they climbed, each breath they took, Elías heard the bone singing.
But only he could.
A melody of things lost, things denied, things rewritten.
---
They reached a ridge.
And saw it:
A valley below — where bones rose like forests, and rivers flowed sideways through books too large to turn.
Above it floated a tower, upside-down, nailed to the sky with rusted chains.
Tirian whispered:
"The City of First Errors."
Elías nodded.
"It's where everything began."
---
And from within that tower,
A single bell rang.
Not with sound.
But with regret.
---
Question for the reader:lf the parts of you that were erased returned… would you welcome them? Or destroy them again, just to remain who you are now?