The floor didn't break.
It peeled.
Stone turned to parchment beneath Rael's feet, brittle and yellowed, veins of ancient ink running through it like roots. Then the parchment curled inward, folding reality with it. He barely had time to curse before the ground gave way completely.
And then—he was falling.
But not through air. Through nothing. Through a gap between laws, where physics forgot how to behave.
At first, he thought he was blind.
Then his eyes adjusted—and he wished they hadn't.
Above him, a scroll of pure light unraveled across a sky that had no end. Glyphs stitched themselves into its skin mid-sentence, only to tear and rethread a moment later, mutating into new forms. Some were symbols he almost recognized. Others recoiled from recognition, too alien to name. Below him drifted rivers made not of water, but of script—lines of ink flowing like currents, spinning into whirlpools of grammar that pulled in meaning itself and spat it back out broken.
He passed a statue floating sideways in the void—its arms shattered, face erased. Rael felt, not knew, that it had once been a god.
Its mouth still moved, repeating a phrase in a dozen forgotten tongues.
Then it crumbled into ash.
A presence stirred.
Not watching—reading.
Rael clutched at his chest, breath catching. The Mark hadn't flared yet, but it felt like something in him was being underlined, flagged for deletion. In front of him, floating against the dark, a glyph appeared.
It was fractured.
Shimmering with unfinished strokes. Its shape warped between one letter and the next, constantly trying to become something. Rael stared—and it stared back.
A glyph was never meant to do that.
It drifted closer.
He tried to back away. There was no away.
The glyph hovered a moment longer—then drove itself into his chest like a blade made of pure code.
Rael tried to scream, but no sound came out.
He flailed, twisting in the void, and the pain gave way to heat. Not fire, but creation—an ache in the marrow as if someone was carving meaning into his very existence. He saw his name, incomplete. His body, outlined in glowing clause-lines. He was being written.
"You have touched the Script, Deviance-Bearer."
The voice was not one, but many. Echoing. Layered. Mechanical and divine.
"You are now an unauthorized edit."
And then the void spat him out.
The scrolls, the statues, the script-rivers—all tore away in a scream of syntax, and Rael slammed back into the mine's broken earth, glyph-dust spraying around him like shattered commandments.
He lay there, gasping. The glyph still burned inside him, but its shape was gone—buried under skin.
The mark that had seared itself unto his skin– the Mark of Deviance?- had settled.
And deep in the world's code, something had begun to unravel.
Of course, Rael doesn't know that yet.
He was too preoccupied by the pain coursing throughout his veins.
"Ow, fuck! What the hell?!" Rael doesn't even realize he could speak again, his mind too busy with the pain to think of anything else.
Right there, on his chest, are words forcing itself to write on his skin.
There is only one kind of glyph that could sear itself unto skin so painfully.
A Name-Script.
But this wasn't like a noble's birthright mark, glowing in clean gold or imperial blue. Nor like a commoners' more uncommon branding, softly emitting a copper-like glow. This was raw ink, the color of old blood and smoke. It writhed like it hadn't decided what language to be in. Parts of it shimmered with broken grammar. Others corrected themselves mid-stroke, then shattered and reformed again.
Rael clawed at his shirt, tearing the fabric open to see it. Glyphs spiraled outward from the center of his sternum—some curved, others jagged, none stable. They didn't sit on his skin. They sank into it. Through it.
It wasn't just being carved. It was being embedded. Etched into his existence.
He tried to scream again—no words this time. Just sound. Just fury. "No! No, no, no—I don't want this—"
The glyphs responded. For a split second, one line glitched—as if it was listening. Then it stitched itself tighter, like a lock snapping shut. Like it was taunting him.
Rael went still. What the fuck is happening to me?
A pulse went through the air. Like a silent gong. Or a clause being closed. And then—across the glyphs on his chest—two words locked into place.
'RAELUS NULLBOUND, CHAMPION OF THE VOID'
Below it, various runes appeared and disappeared on his skin.
Scriptbreaker. Deviance-Bringer. Worldshaker.
He stared. He understood. Not because he could read glyphs. But because somehow… Somehow he understood, deep down. He just did, okay? Damn. Let a man be confused in peace.
He had a Name-Script now. His first. His only. Not earned. Not bestowed.
Forced.
He wanted to feel ttriumphant but what crawled up his spine wasn't pride.
It was dread.
Meanwhile, Somewhere far away from Dunesmir, past the veil of what most knew, a man sat cross-legged in a ruin in the sky that refused to fall.
He couldn't have been more than twenty. Older than Rael by a few years at most.
He looked like a vagrant priest or a scholar who'd forgotten what he was studying—barefoot, draped in patchwork robes stitched from melted spellcloth and repurposed cloaks. His hair hung in ragged knots. One eye flickered. Not the pupil—the entire eye. It glitched, like a flickering candle behind a lens that didn't quite belong in this world.
The walls around him pulsed faintly. Not with life.
With syntax. With error.
A glyph was stitched into the stone every foot or so—fragile things, bent and warped like broken teeth. They didn't match any known dialect.
One of them shivered.
The young man froze. Then, slowly, his gaze lifted.
He didn't look toward the stone.
He looked beyond it—through it—toward something that hadn't existed a moment ago.
"…Ah," he breathed. His voice was soft. Youthful. Like it still remembered warmth.
But the glyphs didn't like the sound of it. The moment he spoke, they began to unwrite themselves, symbols unraveling like seams pulled by invisible fingers. He clutched his head, wincing as a spark of pain split through his skull. His memories rearranged again—weeks crumbling into minutes, people into syllables.
Who was I again?
He didn't remember the answer. Not fully.
But he remembered the feeling.
That weight. That moment. That pulse.
Someone else had been written into the world. Into the Script. But wrong.
Like he had been.
The glyph in his left palm flared—a broken spiral eating its own tail.
"…He has a name now," the young man whispered, voice barely a thread. "They named him."
He should've smiled. That's what joy looked like, right? He's finally free from the grasps of the Mark. The Mark he failed to carry.
But all he could manage was a flicker of something cold.
"You poor bastard."
He stood, slowly, swaying on uneven feet. The tower around him tilted with him—as if mimicking a balance long lost.
He turned toward the east, where Dunesmir festered in silence beneath its towers of smoke. And just before the ruin swallowed itself back into script-fractured darkness, he whispered:
"Let's see how long you last, Markbearer." The young man chuckled coldly, "Good luck."
Then he was gone.
A glitch in the page.
A line out of order.