Divergence of Fate
The mirror had shattered, but its truth remained.
Kiran stood in the square, naked, bloodstained, shadow-drenched. The citizens of Veridian didn't scream. They didn't run. They only watched with wide, terrified eyes—as if any sudden movement might draw the attention of the thing now wearing the form of a man.
His reflection was gone. And the Leon in the void had smiled.
He had to act.
He had to take back control.
Kiran dressed in silence.
The inn was empty when he returned. No innkeeper. No guests. Just dust and the hollow groan of old wood settling.
In his room, the shadows had lengthened. They clung to him like cobwebs, whispering names that were not his. The glyph on his chest no longer pulsed—it throbbed like a second heart.
He stood at the cracked desk and spread out a stolen copy of the Demon Tamer manuscript.
He marked the timeline.
If the narrative still held any power, Leon would be attacked that night by a corrupted Beast in the forest beyond Veridian. It was a key moment—a first test, one that would affirm his heroism and establish his bond with Aria, the novel's heroine.
But Kiran would go first.
He would intervene.
A simple disruption. A thread snipped early.
Just enough to see what happened.
The forest was not as he remembered it.
It was darker now. Thicker. Trees that bent unnaturally, bark peeling to reveal something like veins. The air was thick with rot and echo. Insects buzzed in reverse. Leaves wept black sap.
He reached the glade—just as described in the novel.
This was where the corrupted Beast would appear.
He waited.
And it came.
A horror. Wolf-shaped, but wrong. Too many eyes. A mouth that opened vertically. Its body was stitched together from other corpses—Beasts and humans alike. The smell was overwhelming.
But he wasn't afraid.
He moved first.
He shouldn't have been able to fight it. The Kiran of the novel would have cowered. Died.
But this Kiran—this creature shaped by void and shadow—moved.
His hands twisted midair, pulled energy from the dark. Tendrils lashed out, wrapping the Beast, draining it of its scream.
It fell.
Dead.
Leon never arrived.
Kiran knelt by the creature's corpse.
Steam rose from it. The corruption had been purged.
He had changed the story.
He felt a sudden weight behind his eyes.
And then, screaming.
Not from the Beast.
From somewhere else.
A sound like a thousand pages tearing at once.
The sky above the trees fractured.
Reality hiccuped.
Kiran stumbled back as space folded in on itself. The trees blurred. The ground cracked open. The corpse began to reanimate—not as a Beast, but as something abstract. A silhouette made of narrative threads and broken plotlines.
The story was retaliating.
He ran.
But the forest no longer obeyed direction. Paths repeated. Roots grasped. Leaves whispered dialogue from chapters that had never existed.
He fell. The glyph on his chest flared.
He screamed.
The thing—whatever the Beast had become—descended.
It wasn't physical now. It was concept. It was error.
A logic break.
It reached for him.
And then—
BOOM.
A blast of energy. Silent, white, and absolute.
Kiran flew backward, crashing through branches, bones cracking. The Beast-thing was vaporized in a radius of pure negation.
Smoke.
Silence.
He coughed blood, vision swimming.
Something stood in the crater.
A woman.
Her eyes were stitched shut. Her hair floated upward like she was underwater. Her skin was translucent, revealing symbols moving beneath the surface like parasites.
She opened her mouth.
And his name came out.
Not "Kiran."
Not "Rayhan."
But something older.
Something he'd never told anyone.
She stepped forward.
"You broke the loop," she said. "They're coming now."
"Who?"
"The Editors."
And behind her, in the sky—
Lines of red began to appear. Like cuts in film.
As if the world itself was about to be... revised.