The Scene That Shouldn’t Exist

Let me tell you something they never warn you about when you accidentally rewrite reality:

Freedom is terrifying.

Sure, it sounds nice in theory — heroic even. You break the chains, burn the script.

But then… you're standing in a world that suddenly doesn't know what to do with you.

And neither do you.

I sat on the edge of the fractured stage, the notebook resting on my lap. Pages fluttered lazily in the wind — except we were indoors, which meant even the air was starting to give up on logic.

Figures.

My fingers still stung from the ink, like the act of writing my truth had left something permanent beneath the skin. Not a burn, not a wound — more like... a signature.

"Nawar Amer," I muttered aloud. "Main character. Scriptbreaker. Occasional dumbass."

My voice echoed weirdly off the walls. The room no longer felt solid. Pillars leaned at odd angles. Torches flickered in unnatural rhythms. The whole Bastion felt like a bad stage play in the middle of a nervous breakdown.

"Cool," I said to no one. "We're in Act: Existential Crisis."

Then came the knock.

Yes. A knock.

On what, you ask?

On thin air.

I turned slowly to see a door.

A literal, wooden, rectangular door had materialized midair. No hinges. No frame. Just… hanging.

And something was knocking from the other side.

"Let me guess," I said, already tired. "It's the Plot Police. Come to arrest me for narrative misconduct."

The knock came again. Louder.

Zayn appeared beside me — as casually as a shadow deciding to become a person again.

"You're being summoned," he said flatly.

"I gathered."

"By the System Architects."

That shut me up.

"The what now?"

He gestured toward the door like it should be obvious.

"The original Designers. The ones who wrote the world's framework. They don't interfere unless a rule's been broken."

"I didn't break the rules," I said, standing. "I just… kicked them in the shins and walked around them."

Zayn gave me a look.

"You altered a closed scene. Freed a fixed character. And rejected your designated arc."

He crossed his arms.

"You're a walking loophole now."

"Thanks," I muttered. "Nice to be appreciated."

The knock came a third time — sharp this time. Final.

Zayn's expression tightened. "If you don't answer, they'll come in anyway. And trust me… you don't want that."

I sighed.

Looked at the notebook. Looked at my bruised shoulder. Looked at the door floating in midair like some magical HR violation.

And then I did the only thing a rational, self-aware narrative disaster could do.

I opened it.

Walking through a floating door in the middle of a crumbling Bastion wasn't the weirdest thing I'd done lately.

No, that award still belonged to the time I convinced a murder-version of myself to go soul-searching.

But this? This was a solid second place.

The moment I stepped through, I felt weightless.

Like my body didn't know if it was supposed to be physical or metaphorical.

Or possibly both.

I didn't land on a floor.

I just… arrived.

The room I entered had no walls. No ceiling. Just endless white stretching in every direction, so bright it somehow cast shadows anyway.

And in the center, floating above a circular ripple of ink and light, sat three figures.

Cloaked. Faceless. Dripping lines of script from their sleeves like blood.

The System Architects.

I felt it the moment they saw me — not with eyes, but with recognition.

They didn't speak. Not at first.

Instead, a voice echoed through my skull. Clear. Cold. Genderless.

"You are Nawar Amer."

"Yep. Flesh, blood, and a growing list of bad decisions."

"You have altered your character designation."

"I'd call it a rewrite."

"You have unsealed a locked narrative thread."

"I call that… Monday."

"You have corrupted a Class-7 Antagonist."

"Technically, he corrupted himself. I just… offered snacks."

The ink pool beneath them pulsed once — like a heartbeat.

I didn't know if that was a warning or applause.

Maybe both.

The middle Architect finally moved — one hand raising slightly, and with it, the entire air around me shifted.

I was no longer standing.

No longer even shaped like myself.

They were reading me.

Like a book.

Like a glitching script file.

"You are not meant to exist."

"Yeah, you keep saying that. But here I am, starring in Chapter Nine."

They paused.

Something flickered across the Architect on the right — a shimmer of red text, like a system error.

"You are destabilizing the narrative."

"I call it character growth."

The silence that followed was the kind that makes your skin feel like it's being rewritten.

Then:

"You must choose."

That got my attention.

"Remain within the narrative and follow the path of the rewritten line… or exit the system and accept deletion."

Ah.

So this was the part where the system architects give you a knife and ask you to stab yourself politely.

"Okay," I said slowly, "so either I give up control and become your dancing puppet again… or you throw me into the recycling bin?"

"That is correct."

"Wow," I said. "Who wrote your dialogue? A toaster?"

No reaction.

I looked down at the notebook still in my hand.

Still blank.

Still mine.

And in that moment, I realized something.

If they were forcing a choice… then they were afraid of a third option.

Let's pause here for a second.

The Architects had just told me to pick one of two options:

1. Obey the new line they let me write under their supervision.

2. Get memory-wiped and deleted like a poorly received pilot episode.

And for a moment, I actually hesitated.

Not because either choice was tempting.

But because of what it meant.

They didn't have a third option.

Which meant… they weren't omnipotent.

They were bound, too — by their own rules.

And rules?

Well, I'd made a bit of a hobby out of breaking those lately.

I glanced at the Architects again. Their cloaks rippled, script leaking from them like veins unraveling. The room — or non-room — flickered slightly, as if even the space around them couldn't decide how real it was.

"You say I destabilized the narrative," I said, voice louder now. "But maybe the narrative was already broken."

They didn't speak, but the center figure raised a hand again — and suddenly the air tightened like I was being vacuum-sealed into submission.

My chest compressed.

My knees buckled.

"You exist by permission," the voice rang inside my skull.

I grinned, even as my ribs protested. "No. I exist because I chose not to stop."

I lifted the notebook.

Pages fluttered open, glowing faintly — not like magic, but like resistance.

And I wrote:

"A third option appeared. One the Architects hadn't seen."

The world shook.

The Architects reeled back slightly, as if struck.

The white void pulsed red for a single, jarring second. Lines of text glitched in the air around them — broken code, unsynced dialogue, half-formed commands.

"You're not in control anymore," I said, standing tall.

Another line spilled from my pen.

"The character who rewrote his role was no longer bound to their binary."

The notebook pulsed with heat. My name bled through the page, glowing gold and black at once — contradiction incarnate.

The Architects moved then — fast, distorted — like angry fonts crashing into each other.

One reached toward me.

I didn't flinch.

I wrote a final line across the open page:

"You don't get to write this part."

The figure froze mid-reach.

The ink dripping from their cloak halted midair, hanging like suspended time.

And behind them, the vast white space began to crack.

Literally.

Fractures ran through the air like shattered glass. The illusion of perfection was breaking down.

"You built this world," I said. "But I lived it."

And with that, the notebook snapped shut.

The world buckled.

And the Architects —

— disappeared.

Gone.

Erased? Fled?

I didn't know.

But their grip?Shattered.

And in the center of that unraveling plane, the floor beneath me collapsed—

—and I fell.

Falling is weird when gravity doesn't have a script.

One second I was plummeting through a void of fracturing white, the next I was flying sideways past a burning forest that blinked in and out of existence like a broken loading screen.

Reality was glitching.

Badly.

Trees turned into castle walls mid-fall. A lake appeared beneath me, flipped upside-down, and exploded into lines of code before vanishing again. The sky above me was stitched together from pieces of different stories — one corner had three suns, another was pitch black with neon runes spiraling across it.

The world wasn't crashing.It was collapsing inward.

Not just from my actions… but from the vacuum left behind.

The Architects were gone.

And their absence was screaming.

I landed hard.

On what, I don't know — it felt like ground, but it shimmered under my feet like a memory being rewritten mid-thought.

Pain flared through my ribs. My shoulder throbbed. My head spun.

But I was alive.

And alone.

At least, for about ten seconds.

Then the shadows arrived.

They slithered from the edges of the broken landscape — not beasts, not people. Just… gaps. Places where something should be, but wasn't. Where the story had no definition left.

I backed away slowly, notebook in hand.

They didn't attack.

They circled me like wolves built from censorship.

One darted forward, stretching thin across the ground, reaching toward my feet.

I lifted the notebook and wrote without thinking:

"The shadows could not touch him, not yet."

The moment the ink dried, they recoiled — as if I'd suddenly grown thorns.

Okay. That still worked.

Barely.

But it meant something else too:

The world still responded to story.It just didn't know which one anymore.

I looked around.

This place — wherever I had landed — was between scenes. A limbo of broken narratives and half-loaded environments. It wasn't a place meant to be walked in.

It was behind the curtain.

And somehow… I was still breathing in it.

A hum began to build under my feet.

Not mechanical. Not magical.

More like tension — the kind you hear in an orchestra before the first note.

Something was coming.

Not a monster. Not a person.

A reset.

The system wanted to fix itself.

It wanted to overwrite me again.

I gritted my teeth and flipped to a blank page.

"Not today," I muttered, and wrote:

"He found the path forward — not given, but carved."

The shadows shrieked silently.

A doorway appeared in the shattered sky above — not a floating door this time.

A crack. A scar.Something real.

And through it, I saw color.

Motion. Life.

A new scene.

I ran.

Because if the world wanted to reformat me…

I was going to outrun the loading screen.

The moment I leapt through the scar in the sky, it felt like exhaling after holding my breath for a lifetime.

No falling this time.No spinning limbo.No glowing system errors chasing me like unpaid taxes.

Just…

Wind.

Real, honest, unscripted wind.

It carried the scent of earth and fire and something sweeter beneath — life, perhaps. Or the aftertaste of possibility. I landed hard, rolled down a sloping hill, and finally came to a stop beneath the branches of a tree that was actually rooted in the ground.

A normal tree.

What a concept.

I laid there for a moment, staring up at the sky.

Blue. With clouds.

One of them looked like a pigeon holding a knife. Not sure if that was a threat or just my imagination finally getting bored.

Eventually, I sat up. My hands were scraped. The notebook was intact — though a little worse for wear. The gold-black ink along the edges shimmered faintly with something… new.

This world was different.

I could feel it.

Not wrong.Not broken.Just… free.

Like the rules had been whispered instead of shouted.

I stood slowly, surveying my surroundings. The land was quiet. No dramatic music. No pop-up quest markers. Just hills, trees, distant rooftops barely visible through morning mist.

No one knew I was here.Which meant… no one had been told what I was supposed to be.

That was the first gift this place offered me.

Anonymity.

A second chance. A blank canvas with no expected lines.

But of course, nothing stays blank forever.

Footsteps crunched behind me.

I spun, hand on the notebook like a gunslinger reaching for a revolver.

It wasn't a monster.

It was a girl.

Young. Maybe seventeen. Wild hair, one sleeve torn, a satchel slung across her shoulder like she'd stolen it from a noble and didn't regret it for a second.

She looked at me — not like she recognized me, but like she should have.

"You're not from here," she said.

No greeting. No hesitation. Just direct.

I blinked. "Neither are you, by the look of that satchel."

She smirked.

Point: her.

She stepped closer, eyeing the notebook in my hand.

"You're one of the broken ones, aren't you?"

My breath caught.

"What?"

"I've seen it before. People who don't follow the rules. Who speak like they're watching themselves from outside."

She tapped her temple.

"The world's changing. Cracking. People feel it. The story's getting louder… but messier."

"And you?" I asked, wary. "What are you?"

She shrugged. "Something new. Like you."

We stood in silence.

Then she said something that made my spine tighten:

"They'll come looking for you, you know."

I raised an eyebrow. "Who?"

"The next version of the story," she said. "And it won't be asking nicely."

End of Chapter 9.