THE AUTHOR'S WAKE

The room forgot him.

But Jamie didn't forget the room.

He carried it with him now—not in his mind, but deeper, like the warmth of a fire long since extinguished, yet still present in the skin. The breath between hadn't saved him. It had reminded him that he didn't need saving.

He only needed to choose.

The hallways didn't welcome him back. They shifted like ribs around a heartbeat, uncertain of his presence—confused by his return. They knew echoes. They understood fear. But Jamie was not afraid. Not anymore.

Footsteps whispered beside him. He wasn't alone.

He turned the next corner.

Mira.

She stood with her hand pressed against a wall that wasn't quite stone—more like static woven into flesh. Light flickered softly around her fingers, threads of data trying and failing to map her pulse.

"Mira," he said.

Her head snapped up. Her eyes widened.

For a moment, neither of them spoke. The building held its breath, the very walls pausing to witness their reunion.

"You found the long way around," she said finally.

"You found the hard way through," he replied.

They didn't run to each other. There was no rush, no cinematic collision. They simply stepped forward. Met halfway. Like punctuation in a sentence that had been building for far too long.

Mira touched his arm. "You're different."

"So are you."

She studied him, then nodded slowly—like they had both aged centuries in the span of minutes.

Behind her, the corridor groaned.

They turned as one.

The hallway was no longer a hallway. It was folding in on itself, like a book being closed in reverse. The architecture collapsed not with violence but with intention. Paragraphs peeled off the walls. Arches dissolved into unfinished metaphors.

"The building knows," Mira whispered.

Jamie nodded. "It knows we're converging."

"It's afraid."

They didn't wait.

They ran.

But this time, they weren't running from.

They were running to.

The ground cracked open.

Not in the floor. In time.

One step became a hundred. One moment stretched into eternity. The fabric of the building stuttered and rewound, as if the narrative itself couldn't decide what version to show them.

Then—light.

Not searing. Not blinding.

Warm.

Like a story being born.

They landed in a space neither of them recognized, yet both somehow understood.

Not stone. Not flesh.

Pages.

The floor was parchment. The walls, stacked with blank scrolls and sentences mid-formation. The ceiling was a cyclone of draftwork—ideas swirling in orbit, forming and unforming in real time. Doors existed, but only conditionally. If. Then. Unless.

A single desk stood at the center.

Old. Solid. Burned at the corners.

Upon it: a typewriter.

Its keys gleamed like obsidian, except one space sat empty. A missing piece.

Mira stepped forward slowly.

"This is it," she said. "The Origin Draft."

Jamie walked beside her, gaze sweeping the room. "The place before the building was the building."

She looked at him. "Or the place it's been hiding all this time."

He nodded once. "Same thing."

Then he reached into his coat.

The locket still rested in his palm. It hadn't changed.

But something else had appeared in his other hand—without memory of picking it up, he now held a manuscript. Bound in soft leather, humming with latent possibility. No title on the cover, but as he set it down on the desk, silver script burned into its surface:

THE VERSION WHERE WE CHOSE

Mira read the title aloud, voice trembling.

Jamie placed a hand on the typewriter.

It clicked once.

From the ceiling, one final key descended—gentle as falling ash.

Mira caught it.

It was shaped like a question mark.

Not the symbol.

The idea.

A final query waiting to be answered.

"This is the rewrite key," she whispered.

Jamie nodded. "It's time."

But the building wasn't done.

Around them, the wind shifted.

Not air.

Memory.

The other rooms began bleeding in—the failed cycles, the aborted lives, the loops too stubborn to die. The walls flashed with images: Mira cradling a dying Ansel. Jamie screaming as static poured from his mouth. Gareth unmaking himself, glyph by glyph. Echoes. Warnings. Threats.

"Look," Jamie whispered, turning toward the far wall.

It had become a mirror.

Not a reflection of them—but of the others.

Ansel—bloody, determined, pushing deeper into an unknowable wing. Gareth—his skin cracked, face covered in unreadable symbols, fingers etched with purpose and pain. Mira—another version—alone in a corridor of doors, each leading to a different failure.

And beyond them all—

It.

The anti-story.

A vast, formless presence. Not shadow. Not flesh. Not void.

Just... unbeing.

The narrative cancer that eats causality. The building's immune system made conscious. The thing that arrives when characters ask too many questions. When they step off the page and onto the pen.

"It's watching," Mira said.

Jamie placed the rewrite key in the typewriter.

"So let it."

The moment it clicked into place, the room breathed.

Paper fluttered. Doors sealed. Ink ran up the walls.

The building screamed—but not aloud.

It screamed in contradictions.

Rooms collapsed and reformed in impossible ways. Histories rewound and fast-forwarded. Mira saw moments she hadn't lived. Jamie saw lives that might have been his. The walls melted into blueprints. Characters dissolved into intentions. The building tried to undo them.

Tried to reassert the original script.

But the key had already turned.

And they were already writing.

Not with ink.

With memory. With agency.

Mira stood at the desk. Jamie beside her.

She placed her hands on the manuscript.

"What happens if we fail?" she asked.

Jamie looked at her, then at the shimmering storm swirling above.

"Then the building writes its ending."

"And if we succeed?"

"We write ours."

Mira began to type.

It wasn't fast. It wasn't cinematic.

It was deliberate.

She wrote:

We stepped into the place they said didn't exist.We weren't ghosts. We weren't echoes. We were real.We carried memory like firewood—dangerous, but warm.We remembered the name they tried to take.And we rewrote the ending.

Jamie leaned over her shoulder.

Typed a single sentence:

And the building read it.

The room quaked again. Not in anger.

In acknowledgment.

The story was shifting.

And then—

Silence.

No wind. No pulse. No static.

Just the slow turning of pages.

The manuscript's title changed.

No longer The Version Where We Chose.

Now it read:

THE FIRST TRUE DRAFT

Mira exhaled. "We did it."

Jamie wasn't smiling. Not yet.

He looked at the far wall.

The mirror remained.

But now, it showed only one thing.

A blank page.