They entered the valley.
It did not welcome them.
Each step was weighed not by gravity, but by remorse. Even the wind here hesitated, whispering like a voice that knew it should stay silent.
The forest of bones creaked. Some were enormous — ribs of things long dead, wide enough to walk through. Others were delicate, finger-like, still twitching as if remembering how to grasp. Every tree was a mistake.
They weren't just bones.
They were decisions.
Regrets fossilized.
---
The river wasn't water.
It was ink, thick and slow, flowing in impossible directions. It didn't reflect the sky — it reflected the pages of books not yet written.
Tirian leaned down to touch it.
It pulled.
His hand aged five years in five seconds.
Leshra yanked him back.
"No touching the narrative," she hissed. "It bites."
---
Elías led them now, bone-flute in hand, its music trailing behind him like a lament. The closer he got to the tower, the louder it sang — as if the valley wanted to warn him.
Or mourn him.
The tower itself defied reason.
It didn't just hang upside-down.
It pulsed — as if alive — bleeding fragments of sentences from its base. Sentences too broken to read. Some tried to stitch themselves back together midair, failing over and over.
One phrase hovered for a moment before shattering:
"He was never meant to begin."
---
They crossed a bridge of spines.
Each vertebra hummed with memory.
Leshra stopped on one.
She saw herself — not as she was, but as she might've been — leading an army, crowned in fire, her blade dragging behind her like a tail of ruin. The vision vanished.
"I don't want to see more," she muttered.
The bridge answered by showing her nothing at all.
---
At the tower's base, no door waited.
Only a single name, carved into the air itself:
Elías.
It opened.
Not with hinges.
With permission.
---
Inside, there was no floor.
No stairs.
Only a fall.
They plunged.
---
Elías didn't scream.
He dreamed.
---
He stood in a room of mirrors.
Each showed him a moment that never happened — or did, and was forgotten. In one, he died as a child. In another, he ruled over ashes. In yet another, he held a broken quill and whispered, "I never wanted this."
He moved through them.
He touched none.
---
At the end of the chamber stood a figure.
Not cloaked.
Not masked.
Naked — but not human.
Made entirely of red thread, woven into a shape that shouldn't exist. Its face was a spiral. Its hands — made of questions — held a book that bled.
The figure bowed.
"You came."
---
Elías spoke. "What is this place?"
The figure answered, voice unraveling:
"The birthplace of wrong."
---
Tirian, Leshra, and Verrun landed beside him, gasping. Each looked different.
Older.
Tired.
Scarred.
Something had changed in the fall.
The thread-being turned to them.
"You are not authors. You are margins."
Verrun growled. "Say that again."
It did not.
It simply opened the bleeding book.
---
Pages fluttered.
Blood spilled.
And their pasts were rewritten.
---
Leshra screamed.
She saw her sister burn again — but this time, by her own hand.
Tirian dropped to his knees, whispering his father's name over and over — but the name changed each time. He couldn't remember which was true.
Verrun laughed, then wept, then did both in silence.
Only Elías stood firm.
"Stop."
---
The thread-being tilted its spiral head.
"You are the mistake, Elías."
"No," he said, holding up the flute-bone.
"I am the result."
---
He played.
The bone sang.
And the blood froze.
Pages curled backward. The thread-being unraveled, slowly — thread by thread — whispering secrets into the ink-river below.
Before it vanished completely, it asked:
"If you could rewrite your creation… would you?"
---
And then it was gone.
The room trembled.
The mirrors shattered.
But Elías stood still.
The book remained.
He picked it up.
This one wasn't bleeding.
It was waiting.
---
Blank pages.
No title.
No end.
Just the spine.
And carved into it, the words:
"Volume II – When the Reader Becomes the Rewrite."
---
He turned to his friends.
They were still recovering, but breathing.
Alive.
Changed.
So was he.
---
He opened the first page.
And wrote:
"Chapter One: I Never Chose to Be Born, But I Choose What Comes Next."
---
The tower cracked.
The valley wept.
But the ink… smiled.
---
Question for the reader:If you held the power to erase your beginning… would you still be you?