Silas Vane pressed his palms into the cold basalt. The stone's density was the only thing keeping him from drifting upward into the white sky. Every second, he felt the subtle, persistent tug of the Bleed, a phantom gravity that wanted to reclaim his weightless form. His fingers looked like blue glass against the dark rock, the edges of his skin blurring whenever he moved too quickly.
The scavenger loomed over him, his presence a heavy weight in the morning air. He wore a long leather coat reinforced with brass plates that caught the harsh light of the sunrise. The brass was scratched and dull, but it had a physical presence Silas envied. The man's boots left faint, dark indents in the ink-stained floor with every shift of his weight.
Silas watched the man's hand hover near a serrated blade tucked into a wide belt. The scavenger wasn't just standing; he was anchored. He belonged to the Manuscript in a way Silas no longer did.
'He's heavy enough to crush me with a step,' Silas thought.
The scavenger sneered, tapping a heavy glass vial of Ink against his belt. The rhythmic, mocking click of glass on brass echoed off the basalt wall. The fluid inside was thick and dark, shimmering with an oily iridescence that promised reality.
"Not worth the glass to bottle you, ghost," the man rasped. His voice was deep, vibrating through the solid floor and into Silas's palms. It was a sound with mass.
Silas Vane remained silent. He focused on the hollow cavity of static in his chest where a heart should be. He didn't have the breath to argue, and his voice was too thin to carry any weight. He was a smudge on the world's record, a footnote waiting to be deleted.
The scavenger turned to leave, his heavy footsteps thudding against the stone. As soon as the man's back was turned, Silas rolled away. His weightless body skipped across the basalt like a flat pebble on water. There was no friction, no impact. He was a leaf caught in a draft.
He lunged for the edge of a heavy iron grate, his translucent muscles straining against the upward pull of the Bleed. The iron was cold and bit into his ghostly hands. He hauled himself toward a narrow alleyway where the architecture looked jagged and unfinished. This was a sector of poor Permanence, where the geometry of the buildings flickered and the textures were stretched thin.
The air in the alleyway hummed with a low-frequency buzz. It was a sound that made Silas's teeth ache and his vision flicker with gray horizontal lines. The brickwork of the walls wasn't solid; it was a series of overlapping planes that shifted in and out of focus.
'This place is falling apart,' Silas realized.
He spotted a figure slumped against a wall of flickering brickwork. At first, it looked like a pile of discarded rags, but as Silas drew closer, the shape resolved into something far more disturbing. It was a Redact.
The figure was a person the Revision had failed to fully delete. Now, it was a frozen monument of glitching meat and stone. One arm was merged with the brick wall, the skin transitioning into rough red clay without a seam. The Redact's torso was caught in a loop, blurring and sharpening every few seconds as the world tried and failed to decide if it existed.
A halo of jagged white static radiated from the figure. It snapped like electricity against the nearby walls, leaving scorched marks on the reality of the alley. The static was a lethal distortion, a fragment of the Bleed that had been dragged into the Manuscript.
Silas Vane inched closer, his ghostly skin prickling. The lethal static began to tear at his already thinning edges. Small sparks of white light jumped from the Redact to Silas's knuckles, turning his skin into a swarm of black pixels for a terrifying heartbeat.
'If I touch that field, I'll be scattered into noise,' Silas thought.
He watched a stray pebble roll toward the Redact. As soon as it hit the static field, the stone disintegrated into a cloud of gray dust. It wasn't crushed; it was overwritten.
Silas looked around the alley for something to ground him. He found a discarded length of copper wire tangled near a rusted pipe. The pipe was anchored deep into the sub-structure of the plate, one of the few things in the alley with high Permanence. Silas looped the wire around the pipe and then around his own waist. It was a crude tether, but it would keep him from floating away if the static field tried to lift him.
He turned back to the Redact. The figure's face was a smear of features, a chaotic mess of eyes and mouths that shifted like liquid. Only one eye remained stable—a wide, pale orb filled with a terror that had been frozen for cycles. The Redact was still conscious on some level, trapped in the moment of its own erasure.
Silas Vane saw a faint, oily shimmer beneath the Redact's translucent chest plate. It was a concentrated reservoir of Ink, the remains of the person's Permanence that hadn't been wiped away. It was pure, raw existence.
"Just a drop," Silas whispered.
His voice was barely a ripple in the oppressive hum of the alley. He reached out with a steady hand. His fingers began to vibrate in sync with the lethal distortion field. The closer he got, the more his hand lost its shape. His fingers stretched and warped, becoming long needles of blue light.
The static bit into his knuckles. The pain was a high-pitched scream in his mind, a cold fire that threatened to undo his consciousness. He didn't pull back. He couldn't afford to.
Silas pressed his hand further, passing through the outer layer of the Redact's chest. It didn't feel like flesh. It felt like reaching into a bucket of thick, freezing sludge. The resistance was heavy, a physical weight that fought against his ghostly intrusion.
His fingers closed around a small, solid cylinder embedded in the Redact's core. The moment he touched it, the weight of the object nearly dragged him to the ground. It was the most real thing he had felt since he was Censored.
The static flared. A blinding flash of white noise erupted from the Redact, filling the alley with a sound like a thousand screaming radios. Silas's vision went white. He felt his mind beginning to fray, his memories of his own name slipping away into the static.
"No!" he grunted, his teeth grinding together.
He threw his weight—what little of it he had—backward. The copper wire snapped taut, the pipe groaning under the sudden tension. With a violent tug, Silas pulled the cylinder free.
The effect was instantaneous. Without its core, the Redact's body began to dissolve. The meat and stone crumbled into a cloud of fine, digital ash that was immediately sucked upward into the sky. In seconds, the figure was gone, leaving only a scorched patch on the flickering wall.
Silas Vane collapsed back against the copper wire. He hit the basalt floor with a dull thud, the first time he had felt the ground in hours. He clutched the reservoir to his chest, his fingers white-knuckled around the cold metal.
The black fluid inside the cylinder glowed with a forbidden, violet light. It pulsed with a slow, heavy heartbeat that Silas could feel through his palms. It was Ink, but it was different from the scavenger's supply. It felt older, denser, and infinitely more dangerous.
Silas stared at the prize. The violet light reflected in his translucent eyes, casting long, distorted shadows against the alley walls. He knew what he had to do. The first sip would either fix his reality or burn it away from the inside out.
He unscrewed the cap, and the smell of wet earth and ancient thunder filled the air.