The World Forgot Its Script
[Location: A big bookstore in New Delhi, 2025. Kinda.]
The bookstore was breathing, no it was more like it was glitching.
"Something isn't right." The words came out of Abby mouth before he can even process what's happening around him. It was like the entire world was rewriting itself.
Something crashed.
It was not loud, not enough to make anyone run but enough that Abby could hear the exhaling sounds of the floorboards between his heartbeat.
The air itself shifted, like the room was trying to remember what it used to be—and failing.
One second it was familiar. Warm fluorescent lights buzzed overhead. Paperback stack leaned against each other like some tired drunk people. Ceiling fans spun slowly above the checkout desk where an old cashier was reading today's newspaper and enjoying his over brewed chai.
The next second, it blinked.
The fluorescent lights were gone. The ceilings disappeared into vaulted shadows. Shelves stretched longer than it should be, craved from strong dark wood that flickered with strange symbols.
Candles flickered in wrought-iron sconces, casting dancing shadows across books bound in leather and sinew. A ladder creaked across the far wall, it was just standing but looked like it is ready to move on its own.
The cashier aesthetics also changed from a normal looking man to a one from a classic western style fantasy anime. Long coat, plain white shirt, a hat. His cup of chai also changed into a classic beautiful cup straight out of old cinemas.
"What the hell is happening here?" Abby didn't scream. He just stood there, breath caught in his throat like a typo he couldn't fix. He can just whispered these words for now.
He looked here and there, the whole bookstore aesthetic has now changed.
And yet, the book was still turning its pages.
Flip. Flip. Flip.
The paper moved like a wind was caught between realities. The text bled and reformed in front of him, paragraphs changing as he watched.
He stepped closer.
His footsteps echoed twice—once in the present, once in a time that shouldn't exist.
'What the heck is happening here?!. First I need to get out of here, my whole head hurts...'
'AAgghhh.....'
'I will just pick this book and run towards my apartment, I think I am still hallucinating after not sleeping for 5 days. This isn't real.... this isn't real.'
He reached out, fingers trembling, and touched the cover. He picked up the book from the ground and closes it, it had become heavy, it was completely in leather binding now. The cover now read:
"Nirvana: The Forgotten Rewrite"
"I didn't write this," Abby whispered, because saying it out loud made it feel more true. More desperate. More deniable.
The book stilled.
The air held its breath.
Outside, a car honked. A metro announcement buzzed.
'Looks like the reality tried to remind me that I am still on earth. It is just an hallucination... nothing else.... This is still Earth.'
He grabbed the book, shoved it under his arm like stolen evidence, and made for the door.
But Abby hadn't slept in five days. Not properly. Not since the book's final manuscript had gone live. Not since he started seeing things in his dreams that bled into his waking hours.
His foot caught on the edge of the floor.
"Sh—!"
THUD.
He slammed shoulder-first into a bookshelf, sending a cascade of hardcovers thudding to the ground in a clumsy symphony of chaos.
He groaned, scrambled upright, heart racing.
He didn't look back.
He staggered the rest of the way and shoved the door open.
But the door itself had changed. No longer normal see through glass and aluminium doors you see in most of the big stores, it was changed into a wooden one, a heavy oaken slab, framed by wrought iron, engraved with curling runes that pulsed faintly like something alive was breathing beneath the surface.
A chime came from a hanging bell he didn't remember being there—rusted, cracked, and etched with a symbol that made his eyes hurt.
He stepped outside.
And the world… was wrong.
Not broken. Not burning. Just… wrong.
He looked back. The bookstore had become a cathedral of fiction—tall, sharp, and eerily familiar.
Abby stared at it, eyes wide, breath shallow.
"Nope. Nope nope nope. I'm done. I'm out. I'm going back to bed and pretending the apocalypse isn't cosplaying as my novel."
"Even the goddamn font on the windows changed. What's next, talking pigeons quoting my dialogue?"
A beat.
'Hel-lo-Gutr-gu. How're-gutrr-you-gu?' A pigeon sat on his shoulder.
Abby starred the pigeon like it owed him debt.
"Okay. Cool. Reality's doing renovations without asking me first. Totally fine. I'm fine."
Then he looked up.
And stopped breathing.
The sky above was still blue.
But behind it—like a second skin peeling back—something else was waiting.
The Black Sun.
It wasn't shining. It wasn't even glowing.
It was absorbing.
A perfect void. A pulsing eye of narrative gravity.
Not light. Memory.
It pulsed once—and the world glitched.
A car morphed into a gilded carriage for a heartbeat, then snapped back.
A woman walking her pug became a noblewoman with a silver-eyed hellhound. Then normal again.
Abby gasped. "What the actual hell—"
The sun pulsed again. The buildings flickered. Brick turned to stone, signs warped from Hindi to ancient glyphs he half-recognized from his own lore notes.
It wasn't just glitching. It was installing.
Crowmere.
His fictional city.
He turned and ran.
Feet slapping the concrete—no, cobblestone—no, concrete again.
He didn't know if he was screaming. He couldn't hear himself anymore. The book under his arm throbbed like a heartbeat.
'Everything is going wrong. This can't be happening.'
'This isn't some popular webnovel where the reality collided with author's fiction.'
Shop windows stretched too tall. Street signs blinked back at him. People flickered in and out of character skins—like someone was changing NPC models on the fly.
He turned down the alley toward his apartment complex. Or at least where it used to be.
Behind him, the Black Sun pulsed again.
And he could swear—just for a second—it blinked.
Then everything stopped.
The wind calmed. The sky brightened. Buildings and houses becomes normal. Roads also returned to their original state. Street signs returned to their regular names. The air, once thick with wrongness, cleared like a person's fever breaking.
A honk. A bike bell. Footsteps. A chai vendor calling out prices.
Abby stood still in the middle of the street, blinking.
The Black Sun was gone.
There was no glitching. No carriages. No hellhounds.
Just Delhi, loud, crowded, messy, and full of traffic, but alive.
He exhaled a breath he didn't realize he'd been holding and laughed.
"God, I really need sleep."
"Looks like I have been consuming too much isekai anime these days after the deadline end... and doing the stunt of not sleeping 5 days just to see your own book first copy in the market...."
"It is really harmful man, like I only had know the rumours that this causes hallucinations... but man it was deadly"
"Like for real, I thought only two things, first either I am going to die or going to become the main character of my own novel" Abby laughed while talking to himself.
"Okay let's go home first... I am going to sleep until tomorrow."
He turned the final corner toward his apartment. Same cracked sidewalk. Same flickering lamppost. Same smell of burnt toast from someone's open window.
Everything was normal again.
Too normal.
And that, somehow, was worse.
Abby slammed the apartment door behind him, chest heaving.
The silence was deafening.
No glitching. No flickers. No black sun.
The walls were exactly as they should be. The floor was dusty in that way he never quite got around to fixing. A pile of laundry slumped in the corner like a guilty secret.
Everything was normal.
Abby exhaled. Shakily.
"Okay," he muttered. "It's fine. I'm just—sleep-deprived. Hallucinating. That's all this is."
He tossed the book onto the desk, flopped onto the bed, and let his eyes drift toward the ceiling.
"Tomorrow I'll wake up. Tomorrow it'll all be normal."
He closed his eyes.
Click.
A sound. From the desk chair.
Abby froze.
Slowly, he sat up.
There, sitting perfectly at ease in his chair—legs crossed, gloves folded in her lap—was a stranger.
She wore a long formal coat. Pinstripe. Tailored. A black shirt with golden cufflinks shaped like thrones. Short-cropped dark hair, a clean side-part, and boots polished like obsidian.
Her posture was straight. Her expression? Unreadable.
"AAAAAHHHHHH" Abby screamed at the tops of his lungs.
"Who the hell are you?" Abby croaked.
"And how the hell did you get inside my flat?!"
"Who gave you the damn keys?... Does anybody not teach you that there is something called privacy."
"I am very sleep-deprived and mildly terrified—what are your intentions with me, ma'am?" Abby trying to hide behind the bed while saying.
"I see humour is still your coping mechanism. Good." She gave a small laugh.
"I am Agrawal"
"What?... Who?" Abby reaction says it all, can't say he is trying to joke or being serious here.
"Aaghh! You are very annoying you know." She said giving side eyes.
"Heinn?"
Tskk!
"Lets continue this next chapter."
"Wait, wait, what do you mean by th-"
To be continued...