> Before you unwrite a page,
You must first forget you were written.
And that forgetting must hurt.
—Scribe-Healer Hymnal, Rejection Rite
---
I woke to the sound of pages tearing beneath my skin.
They weren't dream-pages. Not metaphor. Not hallucination.
They were real.
Flesh-colored.
Wet.
Growing from the seams of my spine like fungal stalks blooming in order.
When I reached behind me, I felt their ridged surfaces trembling—each one vibrating with a sentence I hadn't spoken yet.
> "You will attempt removal."
"You will fail."
"You will forget you tried."
I screamed.
The pages hummed.
---
I locked myself in the bathroom.
Turned on the light.
The mirror didn't show me.
It showed a diagram.
My body as a living index.
Each vertebra labeled with chapter headings.
My ribcage categorized under "Metaphor Conversion"
My eyes: "Footnote Receivers"
My hands: "Correction Implements"
There was no mention of my name.
Just a phrase written where my face should be:
> HOST: INACTIVE. INITIATE REJECTION SEQUENCE.
---
I grabbed the razor.
Not out of panic.
Out of necessity.
I pressed it to the edge of one of the pages.
The moment it touched—
> It screamed.
So did I.
Not pain.
Language.
A voice poured from my throat that wasn't mine. A reader's voice—cold, practiced, sterile.
> "Attempted self-edit detected. Host lacks editorial privilege."
Blood and ink spilled together.
The sentence on the wounded page glowed:
> "I was born screaming in cursive."
I tore harder.
It ripped.
And behind it?
Another page.
And another.
And another.
---
I collapsed, sobbing.
That's when the knock came.
Not on the door.
On my bones.
---
I turned.
In the mirror, three figures stood behind me.
Clad in rotting robes.
Eyes stitched.
Mouths sealed with black thread in the shape of question marks.
They sang—backwards.
Low, guttural notes in a language that bled out of the walls.
I couldn't understand the lyrics.
But I understood what they meant:
> "Reject the Host."
"Return the flesh to fiction."
---
I asked them, "Why me?"
One stepped forward.
Tore the threads from its mouth.
And whispered:
> "Because you refused to stay unread."
Then: they raised their hands.
The room folded in half.
---
The next moment, I was no longer in my apartment.
I stood in a library made of nails and breath.
The air smelled like ink fermented in grief.
Bookshelves rose and fell like lungs.
And pinned to the far wall was another version of me.
Taren Vale.
Mouth sewn shut. Pages blooming from every inch of his body.
I stepped closer.
He opened one eye.
> "You are the breach," he whispered through the threads.
"You were never rejected. You were misplaced."
---
A book floated to my feet.
Its cover: my face.
Its title:
> "UNWRITTEN GOD: DRAFT 1.0"
---
I picked it up.
It wept in my hands.
Pages began turning themselves.
And I saw what was written in me:
> A betrayal I hadn't made yet.
A sentence I hadn't spoken.
A murder I hadn't committed.
Every page was a prophecy.
Written in reverse.
---
Then: the Rejection Choir surrounded me again.
They hummed.
My skin cracked.
Words leaked out.
I could feel myself losing tense—slipping out of the present.
My vision bent.
And a single sentence echoed across the library:
> "THE HOST REFUSES TO BE ERASED."
---
I collapsed.
A hand touched my shoulder.
It was not human.
It belonged to a being made of quotations.
Its fingers curled in parentheses.
Its mouth a dangling em dash.
And its voice…
It said my name.
Not "Taren."
Not "Eloquian."
> But the name the Archive gave me when I was born inside it.
I can't write it here.
It doesn't survive transcription.
---
But the moment I heard it, I understood:
> I am not being rejected.
I'm being repurposed.
---
The library exploded into static.
I was back in my apartment.
No pages on my back.
No blood.
Just one line, pulsing in the mirror:
> "REJECTION FAILED."
"YOU REMAIN INDEXED."
---
My skin itched again.
I peeled back my shoulder blade.
There it was:
A new page.
Blank.
Except for one word, glowing in the flesh:
> "GOD."
---
I don't know what I am anymore.
But the Archive does.
And it's writing again.
I can hear the pen.
I can feel the punctuation under my skin.
And I know the sentence isn't over.
Not yet.
---
• The Loop That Reads You.
I thought I could leave.
Just open the door. Walk outside. Escape the Archive's spooling grip.
But the moment I touched the doorknob, the hallway looped again.
I stepped out.
Found myself in a corridor with no walls.
Only stacked teeth—human, molar, yellowing—piled to the ceiling. They clicked when I moved. Like they were trying to chew the silence.
I walked five steps forward.
Suddenly—
I was in my bedroom.
I hadn't moved.
> "You are being read aloud by the room," a voice whispered behind my lungs.
I turned.
Nothing.
Just a faint sentence burned into the floorboards:
> "TRY AGAIN."
I did.
And each time I opened the door, a different impossible version of my apartment met me:
One made entirely of typewriters, all typing my breath.
One filled with sobbing reflections, none of them mine.
One where my mother was alive and begging me to edit her death.
On the 11th try, I found the real hallway.
Or so I thought.
Until I blinked—and saw a new page growing from my palm.
> "Taren attempts escape," it read.
"The Archive humors him."
---
• The Choir's Final Binding.
I collapsed again.
The Rejection Choir waited for me this time.
Their mouths bled open, no longer stitched—just fraying at the edges, like the ends of forgotten bookmarks.
One stepped forward and placed a hand on my chest.
Its palm burned like a branding iron—but when I looked, I saw thread instead of flame. Glowing fibers of syntax, trying to bind me in Erasure Language.
> "Let us rewrite the wound," they hummed.
The thread wrapped around my ribs.
I screamed.
But it wasn't my voice that came out.
It was a scream I hadn't made yet.
One I'd been saving.
The Choir stopped.
Stepped back.
One whispered:
> "It's too late. His grammar is divine now."
Another:
> "We cannot bind a Host who's begun to write others."
And then I saw it:
A sentence curling around the air, like smoke.
It wasn't about me.
> "The Scribe-Healers failed tonight."
"Three of them began to forget their names."
"One of them called him... 'The Spine That Walks.'"
---
•The Death That Wasn't Mine.
I collapsed into the bathtub. My body shivering, hollowed.
Then something worse happened.
I remembered a death that wasn't mine.
Not a vision. Not a dream.
A memory.
Of me—Taren Vale—hung upside down in a chamber made of bone. My mouth opened wide. Pages stuffed into it, page after page, until my lungs burst.
And someone—something—watching me, whispering:
> "This is how we end a question."
I snapped awake.
My mouth dry.
A taste like smoked vowels on my tongue.
I ran to the mirror.
My reflection had changed again.
It was smiling.
Only this time—it winked.
---
•The Voice in My Bones
Back in my room, I thought I was alone.
But then my spine vibrated.
Not a twitch. Not a tremor.
A whisper.
It echoed from within my marrow.
> "You are not the first page."
"You are the one they forgot to close."
"You are not a Host anymore."
I dropped to the floor.
Nails digging into the wood.
And from the cracks beneath me, black ink bubbled up, spelling four terrible words:
> "THE UNWRITTEN GOD SPEAKS."
And beneath that, a single new line, carved into my spine:
> "Let there be another sentence."
---
The Archive didn't reject me.
Because rejection requires the system to stop reading.
But the Archive doesn't stop.
> It only rewrites.
---
■■■■
where Taren stops being a protagonist.
And becomes a system event.
Here thing isn't physical decay, or spiritual torment. It's grammatical identity loss — the kind that eats memory in reverse, turns emotion into syntax, and traps a human being inside their own metaphor.
Archive isn't simply a space or a force.
It's a reader.
And worse:
> It remembers what it reads.
Even when the person doesn't.
The loops, the fake escapes, the mirror that drafts him, the Choir that fails to bind him — these are not obstacles. They are proof that Taren is no longer a subject.
He is becoming a tool. A template. A text.
And the Archive?
It's letting him write not because he's free…
…but because it wants to see what a self-aware sentence does to others.
Taren's spine is no longer his own.
And somewhere inside it, the Unwritten God has begun to speak.
---