Teaser: Mira thought escaping the bathhouse would be the hard part. Turns out, the world beyond it was never meant to exist. And now she's lost inside a corridor filled with things the story forgot to delete.
Mira slowed her steps, heart thudding in her chest as she entered a hallway that didn't feel like it belonged.
The air here was still heavy with dust and silence unlike the polished ornamental perfection of the rest of the palace.
This place didn't glow. It didn't sparkle it didn't even have a name.
The corridor stretched far into darkness, the walls lined with half-finished portraits and floating text boxes that never got assigned to characters. Some of the doors she passed weren't real just painted on the wall like scenery.
Others opened into rooms that looped endlessly backgrounds copied and pasted without meaning.
The system had built this space once maybe as a draft or placeholder but then forgot to erase it. She was walking through a limbo of abandoned narrative.
Her bare feet echoed softly on the marble floor. At some point, the rendered surface stopped loading and the stone became flat grey like a 3D model with no texture.
She passed a window frame but there was no view outside just a blank white void humming slightly like an unfinished file.
For a moment Mira thought maybe this was all a dream. That any second now the system would recover, snap back into control and rewrite her out of existence.
But she was still here still breathing, Still thinking. Her awareness hadn't faded.
If anything it was getting sharper, She turned a corner and froze.
Someone was already there, He was sitting on a cracked bench in the middle of the hallway back against the wall eyes closed like he'd been waiting for something or someone.
His clothes were frayed not from battle but from time. His black jacket looked like it used to belong to a protagonist once upon a time.
His silver hair was messier than hers but not unkempt just tired. When he opened his eyes, Mira stepped back instinctively.
He didn't flinch, He just looked at her.
"You're awake," he said quietly.
"You… know me?"
"I know what you are," he replied "Or rather, what you weren't supposed to become."
Mira hesitated, then stepped forward slowly. "Who are you?"
"Name's Rion," he said, standing up.
"I used to be the main character.
Five years ago."
Mira blinked, The name tugged something in the back of her thoughts.
She'd heard it once, maybe twice,
in whispered rumors from palace maids who talked too much.
A character from a previous version of the story. Removed, Rewritten, Forgotten.
"You were deleted," she said.
Rion smirked without humor. "Yeah. But like you, I didn't stay deleted."
The silence between them was thick with meaning neither could fully explain.
Mira wasn't sure what scared her more the fact that someone else had broken the script before her, or the possibility that she was just following someone else's glitch instead of creating her own path.
"Where are we?" she asked, glancing down the corridor.
"This?" Rion looked around.
"This is where the system dumps things it doesn't know what to do with.
Broken scenes. Cut subplots Characters who never got their arcs, They call it the Scrap Corridor."
"Who calls it that?"
He shrugged. "I do. Now you do too."
Mira almost smiled, but it faded as a dull alarm pulsed in the air.
A red light flickered at the end of the hall.
"They're looking for you," Rion said. "You triggered a high-level breach, Correction units won't be gentle."
"I didn't mean to," Mira whispered.
"Doesn't matter, The moment you questioned your place you became dangerous. You're not an NPC anymore, You're unstable code with sentience."
"And you?" she asked. "Why aren't they chasing you?"
"Oh, they tried," he said.
"But the system doesn't like to admit it failed twice. So now, it just pretends I don't exist."
Mira swallowed hard.
"So what happens to me?"
"That depends." Rion glanced toward the flickering light, then back at her.
"You can hide here, rot like the others, slowly forget you were ever real. Or you can come with me."
"Where?"
"To meet the others."
"There are more of us?"
He nodded. "Characters who broke their scripts. Villainesses, sidekicks, rivals everyone the story discarded.
We gather. Quietly. Underground. Far from the tropes."
"And what do you… do?"
"We try to survive. Some of us try to rewrite."
Mira felt a shiver crawl down her back.
Not from fear, but from the weight of it all. The realization that her world wasn't a world at all, but a series of pages someone else had full control over and now she was off the page.
She looked down at her hands.
They didn't glow, They didn't pulse with power
They were just hands, But for the first time, they felt like hers.
"I'll come with you," she said.
Rion didn't smile, but he looked almost relieved. He turned and walked deeper into the corridor.
Mira followed.
Behind them, the system flickered violently. Something growled in the static, mechanical and furious.
The world was waking up.
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Next: Mira descends into the underground ruins of cut plotlines, where a gathering of ex-villainesses waits and she begins to realize she wasn't just forgotten. She was unfinished.