Ten Years Ago
The wind howled through the broken chapel like a beast that had forgotten its name.
Elian huddled beneath a shattered pew, arms wrapped around his knees. The candle beside him guttered, painting flickering shadows across the cracked stone walls. The world outside was ending—at least, that's what the adults said.
Storms had swallowed the hills. Roads vanished overnight. Whole villages fell off every map, as if they'd never existed.
He was ten when Virelow became a Shard.
The elders said it was a "border shift"—a rift in reality that the gods would mend. But Elian remembered the way the ground had peeled like old parchment, and how the forest beyond the west fence now floated in the air like an upside-down mountain, its trees hanging roots-first like chandeliers.
That night, his father hadn't come home.
Nor the next.
Nor the one after that.
---
"Elian."
The voice had come from the altar.
He looked up. No one was there.
"Elian Vale," it said again. "Bring the book."
He didn't remember moving. One moment he was curled in fear. The next, he was walking toward the altar, bare feet silent on the stone.
Atop the broken marble sat a tome bound in black leather, slick with dust. It pulsed.
Not with light.
With memory.
His fingers trembled as he opened it.
There were no words. Only lines. Circles. Strange symbols. Maps of places he'd never seen and some he had—but drawn differently. Wrong. Or maybe right.
His eyes burned.
The ink moved.
> "This world is breaking. But you may draw it back. If you are willing to pay."
That was the night he drew his first map.
And the night the Ink chose him.
---
Present Day – The Blank
The white stretched forever.
Elian stood, clutching the rolled-up Codex to his chest, breath fogging from cold that had no source. The ground beneath him felt like parchment—smooth, faintly textured, unyielding.
No sun. No stars. Just light. A flat, sourceless, sterile glow.
He wasn't dead.
At least, he didn't think so.
Off the map, the voice had said. But what did that mean? A prison? A limbo? A punishment?
His stylus was still on him. So was his satchel. He dropped to one knee and unfurled the Codex carefully.
The Ink inside stirred—hesitant. Wounded.
"…You still with me?" Elian asked softly.
A single symbol pulsed once on the page: a dot.
Yes.
Relief flooded him.
He reached for the Ink, willing it to rise. The liquid-black tendrils coiled around the stylus like smoke catching fire.
"Let's test the rules…"
He drew a line—simple, horizontal, ten inches across.
The line floated in place, hovering in mid-air like a slash across reality.
Then it shivered.
And snapped.
The broken halves curled in on themselves and disappeared with a soft whisper, like breath across paper.
Elian reeled back.
This place didn't follow normal Inkcraft logic. The world here resisted definition. Even something as simple as a line couldn't hold.
"…I'm in a White Void," he murmured.
He'd read about them in the Codex Obscura. Mythical fragments outside of the Shard system. Blank spaces leftover from the Inkfracture. Unmapped because they refused to be mapped.
Territories where reality had no anchor.
But how had he been pulled in?
"Because I tried to redraw Virelow…" he whispered. "And something pulled me out instead."
A trap?
A consequence?
Or maybe… someone didn't want him to fix it.
---
He stood again and began to walk. There was no direction. No change in light. But he had to move. To act.
If he stood still too long, he feared he'd become part of the blank.
Time passed, or didn't.
Then, something changed.
A speck.
Far ahead. Suspended in nothing.
He moved faster.
The speck grew larger—becoming a shape. Then a mass. Then a structure.
A floating door.
Tall. Wrought iron. No frame. Just hanging in the void, humming softly with pale gold glyphs that twisted like vines.
Elian approached, slowing as he reached it. He pressed a palm against the surface.
The glyphs flared. A pulse of sound echoed—a chime made of ink and thunder.
Words formed across the top arch of the door.
> "RE-ENTRY GRANTED: CONDITIONAL."
Below it, another line:
> "Offer Required: A Memory."
Elian froze.
Ink always demanded a price.
But this… this was different.
This wasn't just about altering the world. This was about leaving the Void. And to do that, he had to give up something real. Something personal.
He hesitated.
Then slowly sat, pulling the Codex open across his knees.
A ripple passed through the Ink, responding to the door's demand.
Elian closed his eyes.
"Take…" His voice faltered.
"…Take my 14th birthday."
A strange silence followed. The Ink twitched.
Then moved.
A new symbol formed—Erasure Glyph: Mnemonic Type. It hovered above the page for a moment before dissolving.
A warmth flushed through Elian's skull. For a heartbeat, he remembered cake. A girl's smile. Someone singing.
Then nothing.
Gone.
The door groaned.
It opened.
---
He stepped through.
---
Somewhere Else
He fell.
Not long. But long enough to feel it. And then—
Splash.
Cold water swallowed him. He thrashed, gasping as he broke the surface.
He was in a lake. At night.
Stars wheeled above—strange ones, unfamiliar constellations. The air tasted like iron and ozone.
He swam to shore and collapsed, shivering on wet grass. The Codex lay nearby, sealed and dry despite everything.
Elian coughed, dragging himself upright.
He was in a forest clearing, moonlight trickling through trees shaped like spindled hands. Far in the distance, a spire of obsidian jutted from the ground like a needle piercing sky.
Then—movement.
A figure.
Walking toward him from the trees.
Not blurred like the man in Virelow.
Not a child.
A woman. Clad in silver-gray robes. Her face half-covered by a veil etched with cartographic runes.
Her eyes gleamed with something between recognition and surprise.
"Elian Vale," she said.
"How do you know my name?"
She stopped three paces away.
"Because I've seen your maps. And the things you're going to draw."
"…Who are you?"
She lifted the veil.
And Elian's heart nearly stopped.
Her face was made of paper.
No, not paper—parchment.
Thin, pale skin lined with rivers of ink. Her eyes were real, human, but everything else was a delicate mask stitched from vellum and symbols.
She smiled faintly.
"I'm the one who brought you back," she said.
"From the Void?"
She nodded. "But only because you might be the last one left who can stop the Remapping."
Elian shivered.
"What is the Remapping?"
She looked up at the sky. Then back at him.
"It's what happens when someone decides the world isn't broken enough…"
---
> And somewhere in the murk between Shards,
a hand began to draw again.
But not with Ink.
With something older.