The chapter was warm.
Not the metaphorical warmth of life or love—no, this warmth was biological, beating, like a living organ wrapped in parchment.
Amaka stood in the center of her apartment.
Lights off.
Curtains drawn.
The sealed Chapter 15 rested on her palms like a newborn heart.
It didn't bleed.
But it pulsed.
And with every pulse came a voice—not spoken, but implied, like narration waiting to be born.
> "Write me."
> "I remember how the story ends."
> "Let me in."
---
She placed it on the floor.
Backed away.
The Pen of Resistance still glowed faintly in her hand.
That pen wasn't from the Apartment.
It was something older.
Something that responded only to truth—not outline, not formatting.
Truth… or pain.
And she was full of both.
But she knew instinctively: opening Chapter 15 too soon could collapse her story completely.
So she waited.
Breathed.
Thought.
---
And then—the walls whispered.
Not with the voices of the Editors this time.
Not even the Apartment itself.
This was older.
Slower.
A language made of structure and expectation.
The whisper said:
> "You paused the plot. That is against origin protocol."
The floorboards twisted.
Her windows blinked shut.
The hallway outside disappeared entirely—replaced with a blank page.
Literally.
An entire wall of paper.
No words.
No punctuation.
A void of unstory.
---
She approached the paper-wall slowly.
And realized… it was breathing.
Rising and falling like a chest.
A breath of anticipation.
Her fingers itched.
The Pen of Resistance trembled in her grip.
And the Book of the Source on her desk began flipping its pages violently—desperate to catch up.
But the pages were blank.
All of them.
All her progress—erased.
Only three words remained at the center of the final page:
> "The Source Knows."
---
Suddenly, the Pen twitched in her hand.
A drop of ink formed at the tip.
But it wasn't red.
It wasn't black.
It was white.
White as memory loss.
White as silence.
White as the absence of choice.
She stumbled back, terrified.
This wasn't her Pen's doing.
Something was writing through it.
---
Then, a voice.
Low.
Monotone.
Cracked like stone on stone.
It didn't echo in the room.
It echoed inside her bones.
> "Amaka."
> "Chapter 15 belongs to me."
> "You have trespassed in a sacred manuscript."
> "Now, you must be read aloud."
She screamed—
But no sound came out.
Her voice had become dialogue tags:
> "She screamed," it read. But she didn't feel it.
She was no longer speaking. She was being quoted.
---
And then the paper wall split.
Not tore.
Split—like skin pulled apart.
Behind it stood a figure.
Not an editor.
Not a character.
Not even a narrator.
Something far worse.
Something that had no face—only a paragraph of glowing text, floating where a head should be.
Each line read in a different voice, none of them human:
> "I am the First Draft."
> "I am the Author that came before authors."
> "I am the Source."
---
Amaka clutched the Pen.
Raised it, hand shaking.
But the Source simply whispered:
> "Do not write in my presence."
Her hand froze.
Fingers locked.
The Pen burned hot, then ice-cold.
She couldn't move.
Couldn't blink.
Could barely breathe.
The Source stepped forward.
Each footstep left behind reversed footprints—stepping backward in time.
And from its back… pages unfurled like wings.
Each one bore the name of a story it had consumed.
She saw:
The Smiling Man
House Without Exit
The Grave Nurse
The Mirror Doesn't Blink
Amaka (Rough Draft)
---
Her name—already listed.
Her fate—already printed.
"No," she managed to whisper.
"You don't get to finish me."
The Source raised its hand.
And every light in the city outside her window went out.
Not faded.
Went out—like someone had deleted the night.
---
> "Then prove it," the Source said.
> "Write Chapter 15."
> "And survive it."
It placed a new object on her desk:
A blank mask.
No eye holes. No mouth.
Just a face of smooth, cold story-skin.
She didn't touch it.
She didn't have to.
The mask crawled toward her on its own.
---
On the last page of the Book of the Source, new text burned into existence:
> "Chapter 15 begins with a choice."
> "Wear the mask, and become the story."
> "Destroy it, and become the void."
> There is no third option.
---
Amaka stared at the mask.
Then at the Pen.
Then at the Source—still watching, unreadable.
And she whispered:
> "Then I'll write a third option myself."
The mask twitched.
The Pen pulsed.
The moment Amaka's fingers brushed the smooth, pale surface of the mask, the world bent.
Not shattered.
Not disappeared.
It folded inward, like a book being slammed shut—with her still inside it.
The floor dissolved beneath her feet.
Her body twisted into a shape made of language and sensation.
She was no longer flesh.
She was storyform.
---
Then—silence.
Then—a new scene.
She was standing in her old bedroom from university.
Same poster on the wall. Same desk. Same chipped fan that rattled at 3 a.m.
For a moment, she thought she had returned.
But then she saw the window.
It wasn't glass.
It was a page.
And the sky outside was made of handwritten margins.
---
On her bed sat Amaka.
Another her.
Younger.
Wearing a nightgown she remembered throwing away.
She was crying.
A quiet, desperate sob she hadn't allowed herself to remember.
Amaka—the real one, the present one—stepped forward.
"Hey—"
But the girl didn't react.
Didn't hear her.
Didn't see her.
Because Amaka wasn't a person here.
She was a narration thread, observing.
Unable to interact.
> "She didn't speak that night," a voice echoed above.
> "She simply wept, and the silence swallowed her."
She recognized the voice now.
The Source.
Writing over her again.
---
Then came a knock on the door.
Three gentle taps.
Young Amaka flinched.
Stared at the doorknob.
Whispered, "Don't open. Don't open."
But her body moved anyway.
Controlled.
Scripted.
Programmed.
She opened the door.
And there stood…
Her mother.
But not the real one.
This version was wrong.
Too still.
Too smooth.
Eyes hollow.
Mouth stretched wide into a permanent, plastic smile.
> "Amaka," the thing said. "You've missed your cue."
---
The girl screamed and backed away.
But the room froze.
Time locked.
And then reversed.
Everything rewound—fan spinning backwards, tears crawling back into eyes, words retracted from air.
Until the scene reset.
And played again.
Same knock. Same door. Same terrifying mother-thing.
Again. Again. Again.
Endless revision.
Each cycle twisted reality further.
In one, the mother's head was a typewriter.
In another, she held a red quill that she tried to drive into the girl's chest.
And all Amaka could do was watch herself be rewritten.
---
"No," Amaka growled.
"I'm done being edited."
She clenched her fists—
And felt the Pen of Resistance still in her grip.
Even here.
Even inside the Source's illusion.
Her tool remained.
She gritted her teeth.
And wrote in the air:
> "Amaka breaks the loop."
The scene stuttered.
Her younger self blinked—suddenly noticing something.
She looked around.
At the room.
At the script-window.
At the false mother.
Then she turned—
And looked directly at Amaka.
The real one.
And whispered:
> "Write me out."
---
Amaka raised the pen again.
Wrote one line in glowing fire:
> "This version of the memory never happened."
Reality ripped.
The scene burned.
Walls collapsed into letters.
The false mother shrieked—her voice becoming the static between pages.
The girl vanished in light.
And Amaka fell again—
Through another layer.
Another memory.
Another test.
---
This time, she was six years old.
Standing in her childhood compound.
Sun blazing.
The smell of kerosene and rain.
A shadow of her father standing by the mango tree—his back turned.
Amaka stepped forward.
She knew this memory.
The last time he spoke to her.
She knew what came next.
How it always hurt.
But now… the script was different.
He turned.
But his face was a blank page.
And on it were written only two words:
> "Your fault."
---
"No," Amaka said.
"No, this is not how it happened."
She raised her pen.
The air fought back—literally pushed her hand down.
The Source was resisting.
"You want me to crack," she whispered.
"You want me to believe you over myself."
She pressed harder.
Ink leaked from her nose.
From her ears.
Blood and narrative mixing.
But still, she forced the line into the air:
> "This is the Source's lie."
And the figure melted.
The page-face burned.
The tree exploded into ash.
---
She dropped to her knees.
Breathing hard.
The Trial of the Mask wasn't just showing false memories.
It was testing whether she could recognize her own truth.
And rewrite it.
She looked down.
And found herself holding the Chapter 15 draft.
It was no longer sealed.
One word glowed at the top of the page:
> "Choice."
And then the voice returned.
> "You are dangerous, Rewriter."
> "But even a pen must follow ink."
She stood.
Lifted the page.
And whispered:
> "Then I'll bleed if I must."
---
The mask cracked.
The world cracked.
And Amaka awoke—
Back in her apartment.
Sweating.
Shaking.
The real world.
But something had changed.
The walls were different.
Her bed had moved.
A mirror hung where she'd never placed one.
And in the reflection—
She was still wearing the mask.
Only now… it had begun to fuse with her skin.
Amaka staggered to the mirror.
The mask clung to her face—not fully, but enough to distort her reflection.
The surface rippled when she moved, as if her face were being rewritten in real-time.
Her left eye still blinked.
Her right eye... flickered like a dying cursor.
She reached up to peel the mask off.
It didn't budge.
Instead, new text scrawled across the inside of the mirror:
> "You were never the original."
> "The mask just remembers the first version of you."
---
She backed away, heart hammering.
Her breath fogged the glass.
From behind the mirror, a second fog bloomed—a breath not her own.
And then—
A handprint pressed against the inside of the glass.
Too small to be hers.
Too clean.
Then another.
Then a face.
Her face.
But not her.
Smiling.
Perfect.
Obedient.
---
The mirror cracked from the inside.
A sharp sound—a punctuation mark cracking bone.
Then the glass burst outward.
And from it stepped the other Amaka.
Same height.
Same eyes.
Same voice.
But she wore the mask like it belonged to her.
Smiling.
Flawless.
Eyes hollow.
> "You've gone off-script," the duplicate said.
> "Let me fix it."
---
Amaka scrambled backward.
Grabbed the Pen of Resistance from her desk.
Held it between them like a knife.
Her double didn't flinch.
Just tilted her head, voice sweet and wrong:
> "You're broken, Amaka."
> "Too many edits. Too many rewrites."
> "You don't even remember your original genre anymore."
"Get out of my apartment," Amaka hissed.
> "This isn't your apartment," the double whispered.
> "This is your setting."
> "And I'm the better protagonist."
---
The lights flickered.
The ceiling warped into manuscript paper.
The hallway walls grew paragraphs that pulsed like veins.
Amaka ran.
Her feet hit the tiled floor, but each step triggered a new line of text beneath her:
> "She ran—but the story was faster."
> "She bled, not from wounds, but from deleted scenes."
Behind her, the duplicate followed—rewriting reality with each step.
Doors closed themselves.
Chairs rearranged into barricades against Amaka.
The Apartment wasn't protecting her anymore.
It was listening to the duplicate.
---
She reached the kitchen.
Slid across the floor.
Opened the fridge—found the Book of the Source inside, wrapped in meat paper.
Pages soaked in blood.
But not hers.
Someone else's.
Possibly... another Amaka.
She screamed.
Turned.
The duplicate stood in the doorway now—no longer smiling.
Half her face was glitching.
Static.
Pixels and smudged typeface.
> "Let me finish us," the duplicate said softly.
> "We were never meant to survive past Chapter 14."
Amaka gripped the Pen tighter.
And said:
> "Then you're going to hate Chapter 16."
---
She lunged.
The Pen glowed mid-swing.
The duplicate moved to counter—but Amaka didn't strike her.
Instead, she stabbed the pen into the wall.
And wrote:
> "Split paths. Only one version can stay."
Reality groaned.
The floor shivered.
The ceiling screamed.
And the Apartment split down the middle—literally tearing into two timelines.
One where the duplicate existed.
One where Amaka did.
And the walls began collapsing.
Only one story would survive.
---
The duplicate screamed in rage.
Leapt at her.
Tackled her to the floor.
Hands clawed at Amaka's throat—but her grip was soft. Paper-thin. Draft-thin.
> "I'm what they wanted," she hissed. "I follow the outline. I smile. I stay in genre."
Amaka choked out:
> "That's why you'll lose."
> "You don't know how to surprise them."
She headbutted the double—sent her reeling.
Then grabbed the half-burned chapter from the fridge.
Shoved it into the mask.
And screamed:
> "REWRITE ME NOW!"
The chapter ignited.
Flames of narrative fire licked across the walls.
The duplicate shrieked.
Pages ripped from her skin.
Her body began to unravel—
Like a deleted paragraph spinning into nonexistence.
---
And then—
Silence.
Amaka lay on the floor.
The mask broken beside her.
The apartment dim.
Quiet.
Stable.
But the Book of the Source…
Had turned to Chapter 16.
And across the top of the page, a new warning was written in fire:
> "Congratulations, Rewriter."
> "You've made the story aware of itself."
> "Now the entire building is watching."