> I spelled myself with bone and breath,
But breath began to bite.
Each syllable became a step,
Each step erased the light.
The name I wore was not my own—
It bled, then took a spine.
Now words walk out instead of thoughts,
And none of them are mine.
If you can read this, turn around.
Your shadow knows you lied.
The page behind your eyes is torn.
And something crawls inside.
> — [ENTRY REDACTED]
---
I woke up inside a sentence.
It wasn't a dream. I knew dreams. I knew their texture, their rules.
This was something written.
It had punctuation. It had margins. It had me.
When I blinked, the world didn't reset.
It edited.
The ceiling rearranged into words I didn't recognize—glyphs made from the architecture itself. Each corner of my apartment was now a paragraph end. The shadows spelled commas.
And the mirror across the room?
It didn't reflect me.
It was watching me.
---
I stood up, skin raw from whatever bled out of me in the night.
There was no stylus this time.
Just a faint hum—a frequency that buzzed behind my teeth and made my breath rhyme by accident.
> "The mirror knows. The mirror sees.
It drafts your soul in stolen keys."
I hadn't meant to say that.
It just came out.
Like a verse I'd been forced to host.
---
The mirror flickered.
For a second, I saw a boy inside it.
He looked like me—but wrong. His eyes were ink wells. His mouth was stitched in the shape of a tilde (~). His hands were bones with letters carved in them.
When I looked closer, the mirror glitched and wrote this across the surface:
> "TAREN VALE – VERSION 3.1"
"CURRENT STATUS: UNRESOLVED SUBJECT"
"QUERY: WOULD YOU LIKE TO CONTINUE YOUR SENTENCE?"
I stepped back.
"No," I whispered.
The mirror pulsed.
Then wrote it anyway.
---
That's when the knock came.
Three soft raps against the glass—from the inside.
I didn't move.
Because the mirror—my mirror—just whispered back:
> "I've been editing you in your sleep."
---
I tried to run.
But the hallway bent the wrong way—turned into a looped footnote.
I passed the same door seven times. Each time, the peephole showed a different year.
2049.
2050.
2051.
???.
[REDACTED]
This one.
Not yet.
I screamed.
The hallway answered in brackets.
> "[You are being cited. Please provide your original source.]"
---
I collapsed.
When I opened my eyes, I was sitting in front of the mirror again.
This time, it wasn't blank.
There were three reflections.
All of me.
One smiling.
One weeping.
One with no mouth at all.
Above them, etched in a digital scrawl:
> "Choose your grammar."
---
I reached out, trembling.
The smiling one looked safe.
But safe had become dangerous in this story.
So I chose the one that wept.
The glass fractured.
And suddenly, I was inside the mirror—or it was inside me.
Memories flooded in.
Not mine.
---
> A child writing with their veins.
A woman whose tongue unraveled into a scroll.
A man who spoke only in death certificates.
All of them Hosts.
All of them—versions of me.
One memory stuck.
It wasn't vivid.
It was loud.
A scream in a forgotten library:
> "Don't let the mirror finish the sentence!"
---
Too late.
Behind me, something began narrating my next thought before I thought it.
I turned—
And met my Reflection Proper.
It wasn't a person. It was a punctuation spirit.
A breach-entity shaped like a human paragraph, its joints made of dangling ampersands, its eyes quoting itself.
It reached toward me.
Not with hands.
But with clauses.
---
> "You are unfinished," it said. "I am your edit."
> "Let me correct you."
---
I refused.
I screamed back a declaration:
> "I am not a sentence! I am not written! I am still—"
The entity paused.
Then said:
> "You ended when you stopped defining."
And it touched my chest.
My real name tried to escape.
I felt it press against my ribs.
A single word.
One I didn't understand—but loved anyway.
> "Eloquian."
---
The mirror shattered.
I woke up back in the hallway.
Sweating. Weeping. My skin burning.
There were pages growing from my spine.
Literal parchment, unfolding from the vertebrae like wings.
Each one contained a sentence about me that I hadn't lived yet.
I tore one off.
It bled.
And it said:
> "Taren will betray the Archive in six entries."
---
I couldn't breathe.
The hallway whispered:
> "CHAPTER 3: ACCEPTED."
"MIRROR ENTRY LOGGED."
"Next: Host Rejection Imminent."
---
I walked.
Somewhere, the city had reassembled into grammar again.
The streets formed paragraphs.
Windows blinked out metaphors.
Every human face wore a bracketed name.
I passed a man sobbing on a corner.
He looked up and said:
> "You're being read. Right now."
I asked, "By who?"
He smiled with too many teeth.
> "By whoever believes in you."
---
I ran until my lungs became quotation marks.
And when I stopped—
I found myself in front of a door with no handle.
Instead, it bore a command:
> "TO EDIT YOURSELF, FIRST REJECT THE HOST."
---
I stepped forward.
Inside?
Nothing but a reflection of me.
Taren Vale.
Worn. Fractured. Bleeding from the eyes.
And behind me, crawling across the ceiling of the mirrored room?
A word.
Not a creature.
Not a person.
A word given form.
It said:
> "Definition Breach."
---
■■■■
The Mirror isn't just a surface. It's a device of narrative recursion—a place where the line between observer and observed fractures. When Taren sees his own reflection writing before he thinks, we're meant to ask:
> Is he creating this story? Or being created by it?
The Breach-class entity he meets—his Reflection Proper—isn't a ghost or a hallucination. It's the result of what happens when someone becomes so undefined that the Archive tries to fill in the blanks. Not with memory. But with structure.
> Clauses.
Grammar.
Syntax.
This is the horror of being in a world governed by linguistic rules stronger than physics.
Taren's pages are growing.
But they're not telling his story.
They're telling someone else's.
Someone—or something—that doesn't need a pen to write.
Only a spine.
---
---
ARCHIVE CLASSIFIED: BREACH HOST CATALOGUE
Compiled by Scribe-Healer Unit 12, Revision 404.3b
---
◆ Class I – Lexical Drift Host
> Symptoms: Memory dislocation, name loss, minor metaphor leakage.
Warning Sign: Host forgets nouns first. Replaces them with symbols or animal comparisons.
Containment: Mild sentence binding. Exposure to alphabetical salt.
---
◆ Class II – Syntax Fold Host
> Symptoms: Thought loops, inverted language structures, recursive speech.
Warning Sign: Host speaks only in incomplete sentences, always awaiting closure.
Containment: Rewrite loop with subject redefinition clause. Pray it resolves.
---
◆Class III – Grammar Apparition Host
> Symptoms: Manifestation of punctuation as parasites. Body begins using grammar to move.
Warning Sign: Apostrophes begin appearing in Host's skin. Commas in pupils.
Containment: Isolate. Translate. Do not answer their rhetorical questions.
---
★ Class IV – Definition Breach Host
> Symptoms: Identity infection, reflective recursion, word-body conversion.
Warning Sign: Host claims to "remember pages not yet written." Mirrors begin narrating them.
Containment: Impossible. Breach spreads via belief and reading.
Note: Reading their name aloud may rewrite your own.
---
★ Class V – Editor-Class Host (RARE)
> Symptoms: Reality distortion, unauthorized revisions, Archive override.
Warning Sign: Host speaks in third person plural. Descriptions around them change subtly when spoken aloud.
Containment: Unknown. Status: Under Revision
Quote from Scribe-Healer 37:
"If you meet one, you're already part of the correction."
---
♠︎ Unclassified (Codex Black)
> A host whose language has no root.
No origin.
No reader.
No rules.
Said to appear only once per Archive cycle.
Codename: "The Unwritten God."
---