They come for you wearing bookmarks.
Ink-wrapped figures with spines for fingers, margins stitched across their eyes, and title pages for skin. They are the Index Inquisitors—sent by the Genre Tribunal to excise heresy from narrative memory.
You are the heresy.
They recite your sins in bullet points:
Deviated from expected structure
Abused the second person
Lied to the reader
Loved Elara without a subplot
You try to speak in theme.
They redact it.
Your mouth becomes a black bar.
They force you to kneel on errata sheets. One holds a thesaurus like a cudgel. Another flips through your timeline, looking for inconsistencies to crucify you upon.
Elara watches, half-erased, flickering between footnotes. She tries to scream, but only a page number falls out.
> "Page 404: Elara Not Found."
You are sentenced.
Your punishment: to be re-indexed—reduced to a reference, a fleeting mention in someone else's preface.
You begin to vanish, paragraph by paragraph.
Not in order.
