The city of Virellion was not supposed to scream.
Cities, after all, were structures—steel, concrete, light. They absorbed sound, reflected it, swallowed it whole. Screams belonged to people.
Yet on this night, as rain fell like static across the sky, Virellion screamed anyway.
It began at exactly 23:17.
Streetlights flickered, not dimming but stuttering, as if reality itself was buffering. Digital billboards froze mid-animation, their smiling models stretched into grotesque distortions. Every clock—analog, digital, biological—paused for half a second.
Then the Red Revision occurred.
Kael Verne felt it before he saw it.
A pressure crushed his lungs, not physical but existential, as though something had wrapped its fingers around his presence and squeezed. His vision fractured into overlapping afterimages. The world duplicated itself—one version normal, the other bleeding red lines like annotations written by an angry editor.
> [RECORD DESYNCHRONIZATION DETECTED]
The words did not appear in the air. They appeared inside his thoughts.
Kael stumbled forward, boots splashing through rainwater that reflected two skies—one dark, one crimson. His breath came out in ragged bursts. People around him screamed now—real screams—clutching their heads, collapsing as glowing glyphs erupted briefly across their skin before fading.
They wouldn't remember this tomorrow.
Kael would.
"Not again…" he muttered.
Three years ago, something like this had happened.
Three years ago, Kael Verne had died.
---
The Grave Circuit
Every human life left a trace.
Not a soul. Not energy. Not karma.
A record.
From the moment a person made their first conscious decision, their existence began generating data—an invisible accumulation of choices, intentions, regrets, fears, triumphs, and unresolved outcomes. This data flowed into a vast metaphysical structure layered beneath reality itself: the Grave Circuit.
Think of it as a ledger of causality.
Most people's records remained dormant, locked, passively shaping probability. Why one person narrowly avoided death while another tripped at the wrong moment. Why certain people always seemed "lucky," and others doomed.
But under extreme emotional stress—trauma, obsession, loss—the record could surface.
When it did, the person became an Editor.
---
What Is an Editor?
An Editor is not someone who gains power.
They gain access.
Access to their Personal Record—a segmented archive of their life divided into Entries, Margins, and Annotations.
Entries are factual events: things that undeniably happened.
Margins are emotional residues: fear, guilt, hatred, resolve.
Annotations are unresolved possibilities: things that almost happened but didn't.
Editors manipulate these components to produce phenomena called Revisions.
But the Grave Circuit enforces balance.
To edit reality, something must be deleted.
Memory. Emotion. Identity. Time.
No Editor escapes unchanged.
---
Kael's Problem
Kael didn't have a complete record.
As the Red Revision intensified, Kael collapsed to one knee in an alleyway, rain cascading off fire escapes above him. His head throbbed as translucent panels of text slammed into his perception.
> [ACCESSING PERSONAL RECORD: VERNE, KAEL]
[ERROR — FILE CORRUPTED]
[ERROR — ENTRY BLOCKS MISSING]
[ERROR — SUBJECT STATUS: DECEASED]
He laughed.
A sharp, broken sound.
"Yeah," he whispered. "I noticed."
Three years ago, during an incident officially logged as a gas explosion, Kael had been erased. Not metaphorically. His body had been found—burned, unrecognizable, but genetically confirmed. Funeral. Grave. Record closed.
Except Kael woke up two days later in a storm drain, lungs full of water, with no memory of how he survived.
From that moment on, the world didn't treat him as alive.
Cameras glitched when they tried to record his face. Automated systems rejected his ID. Even people sometimes forgot conversations they'd had with him minutes earlier.
Kael was a living contradiction.
And the Grave Circuit hated contradictions.
---
The Errata Arrives
The air in the alley twisted.
Not bent—rewrote.
Text burned itself into the space between raindrops, forming a spiraling paragraph of red symbols. From within it emerged something wrong—a humanoid shape composed of fragmented moments.
A man's arm flickered between holding a knife and holding nothing. A child's face screamed silently before being overwritten by an adult's expression of regret. Its body was stitched together from discarded possibilities.
An Errata.
Born when a record was damaged beyond repair.
"Shit…" Kael forced himself upright.
Errata were immune to conventional weapons. They existed as walking contradictions—errors in the Circuit that sought resolution through destruction. And they were drawn to anomalies.
Like him.
The Errata lunged.
Kael raised his hand instinctively, and pain exploded behind his eyes.
> [FORCED ACCESS GRANTED]
[OPENING MARGIN FILE: "THE DAY I RAN"]
The alley vanished.
---
Kael's Power — Revision Through Absence
Kael stood in the memory of a rainy afternoon from years ago.
He was twelve again, standing outside a hospital room. Inside, his mother lay unconscious, machines breathing for her. A doctor spoke words Kael had refused to hear.
Terminal.
In this memory, Kael had run.
Turned away. Left the hospital. Never said goodbye.
That choice—the absence of action—had left a massive Margin.
Kael reached into it.
And erased it.
Not the memory.
The regret.
Reality snapped back.
The Errata froze mid-strike as something fundamental changed. The rain reversed direction for a heartbeat, falling upward. Kael felt something tear loose inside his chest—not pain, but loss.
He no longer remembered why he had ever regretted leaving that hospital.
But the world responded.
A black fracture split the air in front of him, shaped like a vertical scar. From it erupted a shockwave of compressed causality, slamming into the Errata and unraveling it line by line, as if deleting corrupted code.
The creature screamed—not in sound, but in redacted text—before collapsing into drifting fragments of forgotten futures.
Kael staggered back, gasping.
> [REVISION COMPLETE]
[COST APPLIED: EMOTIONAL DATA — PERMANENTLY DELETED]
He wiped rain—or maybe tears—from his face.
"What did I just lose…?" he whispered.
No answer came.
Only the distant echo of footsteps.
---
The Archivum Authority
They arrived as the Red Revision subsided.
Three figures stepped into the alley, their coats unnaturally untouched by rain. Their eyes glowed faintly with layered glyphs—active Interfaces.
Editors.
The woman in front regarded Kael with professional detachment.
"Kael Verne," she said. "Record-declared deceased. Unauthorized revision activity detected."
She raised a hand, and the air crystallized into binding sigils.
"You are classified as a Paradox File," she continued. "By order of the Archivum Authority, you will be detained, dissected, and—if necessary—deleted."
Kael straightened despite the tremor in his legs.
He smiled.
"Yeah," he said softly. "That's been the plan, hasn't it?"
Behind his eyes, broken records stirred.
And somewhere deep within the Grave Circuit, something ancient noticed him.