"Every document has a margin. A place outside the lines.That's where we hide the things too unstable to footnote."— Internal Classification Note, REDLINE PROTOCOL
Aren wasn't alone.
Not in the Archive.Not even in himself.
Something was writing alongside him now.
He could feel it.
A pressure behind his thoughts. Like a second pair of eyes reading the lines of his mind as he thought them.Sometimes it corrected him.
Other times?
It laughed.
He tried to stand.
But the floor wasn't a floor anymore — it was context, shifting beneath him based on the last sentence he believed.
He spoke to test it:
"This is just a hallucination."
Solid ground. Almost reassuring.
Then—
"This is a rewrite from something higher."
The Archive lurched.
His surroundings flickered into a different format — grayscale, heavy shadows, margins bleeding red.
A table of contents hovered mid-air:
Preface: [DENIED]
Chapter 0: The Editor's Original
Chapter 1–12: [YOU]
Chapter 13: Scheduled for Removal
Footnotes: [UNKNOWN VERSION DETECTED]
"I see it now," Aren whispered."I'm a chapter that wasn't supposed to exist."
And from behind him, that voice again.
His voice. But bent.
"Not a chapter. A margin note.""You're what the Editor scribbled and erased.""But I kept you. Because I liked the shape of your doubt."
Aren spun.
There it was — him again.Same face. But like it had been drawn by someone else.
Its eyes were reversed: the whites were black, and the pupils glowed like margins on a corrupted PDF.
"What are you?" Aren asked.
"I'm what you become if you keep rewriting yourself."
Suddenly, a hand slammed a stamp into the air between them.
[✖ FILE FLAGGED: UNSTABLE DRAFT][MARKED FOR REDACTION]
Reality screeched.
And Aren watched as the other him was erased — line by line, in reverse order of how he spoke. Each word vanished as if time swallowed it backwards.
Until only one word was left echoing:
"Edit."
Aren fell again — but this time upward.
Spiraling through stacked timelines like bookmarks torn loose.
He landed on a desk.
One he recognized.
Lira's.
Not her current self. Her original assignment desk.
Before she knew him.
Before anything.
Except…
Her journal was open.Her pen moved.
And the line she wrote was:
"Met a man today. No name. No ID. Said he was a draft. A real one. Told me to remember this version of me before they change it again."
She underlined it twice.
And suddenly…
Aren realized:
He hadn't just rewritten a scene.
He had rewritten her memory of him — from before she met him.