: The Forgotten Rewrite
There was no pain. No sound. No self.
Chris floated in silence, surrounded by nothingness—a white so pure it erased thought. She had no sense of her body. No fire. No flame. Only fragments of memory whispered like dying embers.
A girl. A sister. A vow made beneath a burning sky.
Then even that slipped.
The Labyrinth had taken everything.
But something deep inside her—something burning—refused to be extinguished.
She opened her eyes with a gasp.
Cold stone met her back. Her hands trembled against etched marble. Above her stretched a cracked dome of glass, filtering an alien sun that pulsed like a wounded heart. The world smelled of ash and forgotten prayers.
Chris was alone.
No Grey. No Kairo. No Wale.
And she was no longer herself.
Her hair was ash-blonde now. Her scars were gone. Her armor… replaced by a gown stitched from pages—words she couldn't yet read.
Then she noticed the wall behind her.
A mural. A painting too vivid for brush or hand. It showed a battlefield—and her standing victorious above three broken figures.
Grey, Kairo… and her.
Two versions of herself.
In the reflection of the shattered glass dome, she saw the truth: she had become her mirrored self—the version who had embraced the flame without mercy. The one who had burned everything for peace.
Wale hadn't erased her.
He had rewritten her.
Elsewhere in the void-between, Grey awoke with a sword forged from ink. Not steel—ink.
It dripped meaning.
He stood on a staircase that climbed both up and down into opposite infinities. Around him, stone lions made of metaphors paced slowly, whispering logic in broken iambic verse.
A parchment sky rolled above, and when he blinked, it blinked back.
Grey knew this place.
This was the unwritten world—the place stories were born before being told.
The Book was here. He could feel it. But it was not a thing. It was a choice.
And he had to make it before Wale turned the final page.
Kairo awoke last.
He found himself inside a tower with no windows, only mirrors—each reflecting him at a different age. In one, he was still a boy, afraid of his visions. In another, he was old and broken, weeping over names he could no longer remember.
But the central mirror was blank.
No reflection.
He stepped toward it, trembling.
Then a voice—not Wale's, but his own—spoke from the void:
"You are prophecy. But you are not destiny. Write your own fate."
The mirror cracked, and the tower bled light.
Back in the glass-dome temple, Chris staggered to her feet. A path of ink stretched before her—twisting between statues of the people she'd failed. She saw her sister. Her parents. Soldiers who had followed her into fire. Each statue bore a plaque:
"Burned for peace."
Wale was here. She could feel his gaze.
Not watching from afar. Watching from within.
"I know what you did," she said to the empty air.
No reply.
"I know what you want."
Still silence.
"You want us to give in. To become our worst selves."
And still—nothing.
But the statues wept ink.
Grey climbed the staircase until it ended—not in a summit, but a mirror. A familiar one.
It reflected not his face, but his regret.
Behind the glass stood Wale, calm and radiant.
"You could unmake me," Wale said. "Right now. Pierce this mirror. Rewrite the tale."
Grey gripped the inkblade tightly.
"But consider," Wale whispered, "What will be lost? All the victories. All the love. All the understanding born from pain. Do you really want to live in a story that never suffered?"
Grey hesitated.
That was Wale's true power—not just manipulation, but reason.
The kind that twisted you slowly. That sounded like mercy.
Kairo burst from the tower into a sky made of turning pages. He floated, falling upward. Above him, thousands of books opened all at once—each telling a different version of this moment.
In some, they lost.
In others, they became monsters.
In one, Wale died.
But in none did the world truly heal.
Because Wale wasn't the sickness.
He was the symptom.
He was created by a world that feared vulnerability. That taught children to wear smiles like armor. That turned grief into spectacle, and kindness into performance.
Wale wasn't just the villain.
He was the consequence.
The three of them found each other again—not through chance, but choice.
Chris stepped into the parchment plain with inkfire blazing in her eyes.
Grey descended from above, inkblade sheathed, carrying silence like a torch.
Kairo emerged from the sky, holding a book he hadn't written—yet somehow remembered.
And Wale stood in the center.
Not smiling.
Just waiting.
"You've all come so far," he said. "Learned so much."
"End this," Chris said.
"I can't," Wale replied. "You brought me here. You wrote me into your fears. Into your weaknesses. I am not your enemy. I'm your shadow."
"Then let us cast you out," Grey said.
Wale tilted his head. "Are you sure?"
He lifted the Book.
Chapter 500: The Ending.
Blank.
"Finish it," he said. "Kill me. End the story. Be the victors. Rewrite the world."
Chris reached for her flame.
Grey drew his blade.
Kairo opened his book.
But all three froze.
What came after?
A perfect world? Peace?
Or just… emptiness?
Wale smiled—gently, not wickedly.
"Maybe," he said softly, "you need me more than you admit."
And that was the tragedy.
He wasn't wrong.
In the end, the book closed not with a scream, but with a sigh.
They left the world rewritten—but not perfect.
Wale lived on.
Not in form.
But in fear.
In silence.
In reflection.
For monsters like him didn't need bodies.
They just needed to be remembered.
And every mirror remembers something.