Black.
Complete and utter black.
Purifying black.
That's all I see.
Everything is reverting back to how it was — not perfectly, not exactly, but close enough to it once was.
Each cycle of life and death changed something. Always something minor. Maybe it was the name of my pet fish or the pattern of the wallpaper. Tiny details that built up over a thousand lives, until nothing resembled what it once was.
When I open my eyes, there's a plain wall in front of me.
I remember that wall.
It's my old room.
I'm back here again. For the one thousand five hundred eighty fourth time.
I look at my hand.
I don't know how long it's been.
I don't know how long it'll be until I smile again —
but right now, I do.
I smile because my hand is bleeding from a cut.
For once, that pain meant something.
There is no longer an Author of my destiny.
—
In the moment of my death,
in the void between nothing and life,
I wrote.
Using that shard of glass, my blood became will, and my will became ink — inscribing itself into the fabric of existence.
All I managed to write was a single line:
"I am the only Author of my destiny."
That was freedom.
Or so I thought.
—
Now that I am staring at the cut on my hand, something glints beneath the blood.
I take a pair of pliers and pull it out — a fragment of glass.
The same glass from the ink cartridge.
This has never happened before.
Every time I died, everything was erased — objects, scars, all of it.
Only memories survived.
For the first time, something crossed over.
I turn the shard between my fingers. It hums faintly, a resonance that doesn't belong to this world — as if it remembers the white room, the moons, the stream of stars. The air bends around it, light shifting in unnatural patterns. I could feel it's pull towards that place. As if it yearns to go there.
But that makes sense, in a way that defies reason. That place — the void beyond the gate , wasn't just another realm. It was the framework beneath existence itself, where stories were born, lived, and erased.
Things from there aren't bound by rules like time, decay, or consequence. They simply are because they are. Reason is not of concern.
This shard isn't just a remnant of an ink cartridge.
It's a splinter of the narrative that defines.
It shouldn't exist here.
And yet, it does.
He must be planning to find another version of me.
But why?
Why me?
What is that ink?
Why must it be written at all?
Questions flood my head — but there are no answers.
No theories.
Nothing.
Only one thing is certain for sure,
He is not me.
No matter how many times I die, no matter what I endure, I will never become him.
He's not me.
And I am not him.
I'll never be him
—
I sit in my room.
It's quiet.
For now.
In two days, this city will cease to exist.
Magic will return to this world.
And I'll begin my endless journey again.
But for the moment — I think I'll rest.