3. Just Another Character

Char turned and ran.

The city blurred around him, spires stretching high above like jagged knives piercing an endless sky. The glass-like ground rippled beneath his feet, every step sending strange, soundless vibrations through the air. He didn't know where he was going—only that he had to move.

The faces of his characters—no, not his characters anymore, just people now—flashed in his mind. Tess, her smirk like a blade against his ribs. Ishmael, cold and calculating, sizing him up like an opponent he didn't yet understand. Marin, unreadable, as if she'd already dismissed him. Callen, the only one who had looked amused, as though he'd seen fools like Char before.

They had looked at him like they knew him.

Char turned a corner sharply, his breath ragged. His mind was spinning, trying to pull the details together. The fountain. The confrontation. The creeping feeling of wrongness—and then, suddenly, their expressions had shifted. The recognition had faded from their eyes, like a flame flickering out.

One moment, he had been an anomaly in their world. The next, he was just another face in the crowd.

What the hell was happening?

His thoughts lurched back to the story, his story—the one he had started and abandoned over and over again. He forced himself to think through it, through the plot he had tried to craft but never finished. What happens next?

The opening chapters…

The city—Oryn-Vel. A glowing metropolis built on ancient foundations, where energy hummed in the very bones of the streets. He had written it as a world full of mystery, of long-forgotten histories buried beneath sleek, advanced architecture. A place where past and future blurred.

The story had begun with a secret meeting. The main players—Tess, Ishmael, Marin, Callen—had gathered in that very courtyard by the fountain, discussing the first threads of a plot Char had never fully unraveled. Something about a missing artifact, a conspiracy buried under layers of deception. It had all been a jumble of half-formed ideas, stitched together with overambitious prose. He had never decided what it meant.

And yet, here he was, standing in the middle of it.

If this is the beginning of the story, he realized, then I know what happens next.

The memory hit him with chilling clarity. A patrol. The city's guards—figures clad in dark armor, their faces obscured by sleek helmets—would be passing through soon. Char had written it that way, to add tension, to force the characters to scatter into the shadows before they were discovered.

And if he stayed here too long, if he followed the script, then—

A low, mechanical thrum filled the air.

Char's stomach clenched.

The patrol was coming.

A surge of panic rushed through him, and he turned, sprinting blindly down an alleyway. The walls around him shimmered, reflecting his movements in distorted, glassy patterns.

Get out. Get out. Get out.

The city twisted and coiled in his mind like an unfinished map. He had never fleshed out every street, every detail—just vague descriptions and half-written paragraphs. The parts he hadn't developed shouldn't exist.

And yet, they did.

He wove through unfamiliar streets, past towering structures that had only been briefly mentioned in his drafts. He had never described the small, signs that hung from the metal overhangs. He had never written the scent of burning ozone into the air. He had never imagined the distant murmur of voices behind closed doors.

It's filling in the blanks.

The city was expanding, unfolding around him like a story being written in real time.

He ran until his lungs burned, until his mind stopped processing the impossible. Until his feet skidded against the glassy pavement, and he realized with a sharp jolt that he had somehow ended up right back where he had started.

The courtyard.

The fountain.

And them.

They were still there. Tess, Ishmael, Marin, Callen—all standing as they had before. But now, something was different.

They weren't looking at him.

They weren't reacting to him at all.

Tess was speaking in a low, urgent tone, arms crossed, her hood pulled lower over her face. Ishmael stood stiffly beside her, his gaze scanning the area, watchful but detached. Marin was checking something on a small, glowing device in her hand, frowning. Callen leaned lazily against the fountain's edge, smirking at something Tess had said.

It was exactly as Char had written it.

They weren't waiting for him. They weren't acknowledging him.

They didn't know him.

The eerie, electric awareness he had felt before—the way they had spoken to him, as if they saw him as an outsider, as something wrong—it was gone.

His presence wasn't an anomaly anymore. He wasn't special.

He was just there.

Like he had always been. Like he belonged there.

His breath hitched as a terrifying thought sank in.

Whatever had happened when he arrived—the brief moment where they had seemed aware of him—was over.

He wasn't outside the story anymore.

He was in it.

And that meant he was just another character now.