Kaelen sat in the heavy silence that followed the King's departure, his breath hitched in his chest like a trapped bird. The room was solid again, or at least, it pretended to be. He gripped his own wrist, feeling the iridescent glow beneath his skin, half-expecting his fingers to pass through his own flesh. But they held. His mind was a battlefield of sensory data, struggling to re-stitch the tapestry of reality that the King's presence had unraveled. It wasn't that the table had actually turned to smoke; it was that his conviction—the mental glue that held the "material" together—had simply dried up and blown away.
He knew the man beneath that black metal crown. He knew him as well as an orphan can know the shadow that feeds him. The King had always been this way: a distant, jagged silhouette who spoke in riddles of salt and stone, a guardian who had raised him not with affection, but with the cold precision of a blacksmith tempering a blade. Kaelen had spent years in the King's orbit, yet he realized now he had never truly seen him. He had only seen the shape the King allowed him to see—a rough, black metal mask that offered no reflection.
By looking beneath the table, he had looked beneath the "idea" of his own existence, and now the idea was falling apart. Driven by a desperate, doubting impulse, Kaelen reached for the book again. He didn't want to see more, but the silence of the room was worse than the terror of the text. He turned the page, his hands trembling with an irregular rhythm.
The next page was not empty. It was filled with a cramped, aggressive script that seemed to shift as he looked at it, the letters vibrating like angry insects.
"The orphan cries for a father, but the successor searches for the source. You feel the world fading not because it is gone, but because you are realizing you were never a part of it. You were always an interloper in the material, a ghost wearing a skin-suit. Tell me: if you stop thinking of your heart as a pump, does it have the permission to beat?"
Kaelen's hand flew to his chest. He felt the steady thump-thump of his pulse, but as soon as the text entered his mind, the rhythm faltered. He began to think about the muscle, the valves, the electrical signals. He began to manage it. The automatic became manual. The internal became external. He was suddenly, terrifyingly aware that he was piloting a body he no longer trusted to function on its own.
'It's a trick. It's just words,' he told himself, but the salt on his tongue was thicker now, a bitter tide rising in his throat.
He realized then that the King hadn't confronted him with a monster; the King had confronted him with his own inability to differentiate fiction from reality. His senses weren't being attacked by a spell; they were dying of neglect.
He looked back at the book. Below the paragraph, a single sentence was written in a different hand—a hand that looked hauntingly like his own.
"If the room is only real because you believe in it, then what happens to you when you stop believing in yourself?"
Kaelen slammed the book shut. The sound was like a gunshot in the tiny room. He stood up, his legs feeling like stilts made of glass. He needed to leave. He needed to find a window, a sky, a piece of the world that didn't know about the King or the Unstructure.
He stumbled toward the door that had reappeared when the King left. As he reached for the handle, he hesitated. His mind was screaming that the brass was fake, that the wood was a thought, that the hallway was a lie.
He forced himself to grab the handle. It was cold. It was solid. He turned it and stepped out, but as the door swung open, the palace corridor was gone.
The air was no longer stale; it was freezing, carrying the scent of ozone and ancient dust. He was standing on a balcony of dark, jagged stone that seemed to jut out into a void of swirling, violet-tinged clouds. There was no ground below, and no stars above.
A few paces away, standing at the very edge of the stone, was the King. His robes billowed in a wind that Kaelen couldn't feel, and the points of his black metal crown seemed to pierce the very fog itself.
"You are trying to find the exit," the King said, without turning. "But you are still walking with your eyes. You haven't realized yet that the door was just another page you turned."
Kaelen looked back. The room was gone. The door was gone. There was only the jagged stone ledge and the King, silhouetted against a sky that refused to exist.
It is a curious thing, the way a witness chooses to believe what they see. One might observe the jagged stone beneath Kaelen's boots and the vast, swirling void and conclude that a miracle of travel has occurred. One might believe that the slam of a book and the turning of a latch were physical acts of defiance.
But belief is the first deception.
In truth, the book was never shut. The hand that reached for the brass handle never moved. The moment those final, ink-stained words entered his mind, the thread between Kaelen's consciousness and the material world didn't just fray—it snapped. He did not walk; he fell inward.
To an outside observer, Kaelen is still in that chair, his head slumped forward until his forehead brushes the dark leather binding. He is unconscious, a vessel whose pilot has abandoned the controls. But in the Unstructure of a dying mind, the balcony is real. The cold is real. The King is real.
The danger lies in the overlap. If the mind truly stops differentiating between the fiction of the ledge and the reality of the room, then a fall in one is a death in both. As he stands there, gasping in the violet mist, his heart—denied its automatic permission to beat—begins to slow in the chair.
Kaelen is not being hunted by monsters. He is being hunted by the fact that he can no longer remember how to be a person.