The white light did not fade—it shattered. Like porcelain cracking from the inside, it splintered into brilliant fragments and dissolved into air.
When my vision returned, I was lying in grass.
Not velvet carpets. Not spellbound halls.
Just… grass.
I blinked and sat up, my breath catching in my throat.
The sky overhead was pale and cloudless, the color of old paper left too long in the sun. Wind moved gently through the tall grass, rustling like whispers between the lines of an unwritten story.
Alaira stirred nearby, groaning as she pushed herself upright. Her sword was gone. So was the corridor, the Binder, and the mirrors. But the ache in my bones, the memory of being almost erased, still pulsed faintly like a bruise in my chest.
"Where are we?" she asked, looking around.
I stood slowly, brushing off dirt. "I don't know."
But I did.
Somewhere in me, I knew.
This was the place where forgotten characters fell.
This was the Ditch—a place barely mentioned in the novel, only referenced in half a sentence by a mad prophet before he was killed for raving.
"Even the discarded will rise again from the Ditch, if the story is starved long enough," he'd said.
I hadn't understood it then.
I did now.
We stood in a realm of unwritten remnants—of scenes that were drafted, then cut. Of people meant to live, then removed. It wasn't a setting the Author ever meant for readers to see.
"Look," Alaira said.
I turned—and saw the bones.
Dozens of them, scattered in the grass. Some small like a child's, others massive and twisted, as though they once belonged to creatures that couldn't exist in any world governed by logic.
One skeleton was still clothed—in royal robes. Its head was missing.
A name drifted to the surface of my mind.
"Lady Erienne."
She'd been mentioned in chapter four as a previous fiancée of the prince—"died tragically of a sudden illness."
Only she hadn't.
She'd been discarded.
"Do you feel that?" Alaira asked.
I did.
A hum, low and constant, like breath held for too long.
The Ditch was alive.
But not in the way the story was.
It was hungry.
We weren't supposed to be here. Not yet.
"We broke the page," I whispered. "We fell between chapters."
Alaira swore softly. "Can we get out?"
"I think…" I swallowed. "We have to write our way out."
She raised an eyebrow.
I knelt and touched the ground. It shimmered faintly, and beneath my fingers, grass gave way to parchment.
Lines formed—faint at first, then sharper, like ink responding to thought.
A door appeared.
No walls. Just the door, freestanding in the field.
Alaira stepped back. "You trust it?"
"No," I said honestly. "But I trust the part of me that remembers dying here."
The door opened with a soft click.
Inside was darkness.
No light, no floor. Just black.
I turned to Alaira. "If we go through, we might end up anywhere. Any version of the story."
"Then we go together," she said firmly, and took my hand.
We stepped through.
It was raining.
The castle was in ruins.
Stone towers stood cracked, ivy growing wild through shattered windows. Fires smoldered in distant wings, and the sky above was a strange shade of violet.
I knew this place.
"This is the final ending," I whispered. "The one where the villainess wins—but at the cost of everything."
A version where Evelyne took power by force. Where she destroyed the prince, burned the author's draft house, and became Queen of Ashes.
A dead world. A bitter one.
A version of me stood at the top of the broken stairs, clad in black and crimson.
She looked down at us with tired eyes.
"You shouldn't be here," she said.
I felt a strange, fractured pressure behind my eyes. "You're me."
She nodded. "The version that stopped caring."
Alaira stepped in front of me. "What happens to this world?"
"Nothing," the Queen of Ashes replied. "Everyone is gone. I won. And I hated it."
I stepped forward. "We need to leave. We need to find the core—the chapter where it all broke."
"You're close," she said. "Too close. He'll notice soon."
"Then tell me where to go."
She pointed toward the throne room. "Under the dais. There's a draft tunnel. It leads to the very first deviation."
I hesitated. "Why are you helping me?"
The Queen's eyes flickered. "Because even I want to forget this version of us."
A pause.
"Rewrite me, Evelyne. Please."
The wind picked up, and for a moment, she looked like she was turning to ash.
We ran.
Beneath the throne dais, the tunnel opened with a groan of protest. Dust spilled from the stones like sand through an hourglass.
Alaira kept close. "Do you trust her?"
"I trust what I don't want to become."
As we descended, the tunnel began to glow faintly with runes—half-written sentences, plot outlines, deleted footnotes. One note was burned into the stone itself:
"Evelyne is not supposed to remember."
Another:
"Kill her before the 30th day. Memory is a contagion."
I shivered.
"Alaira," I said slowly, "What if I was meant to break the story?"
She looked at me seriously. "Then let's break it beautifully."