The tunnel narrowed as we walked. The glow of ancient runes dimmed to a hush of light underfoot—barely enough to see, but too persistent to be natural. Every step made the air thicker, as if the words etched in the stone around us were watching, weighing, waiting.
Alaira stayed beside me, swordless but tense. "Do you feel that?"
"Yes," I whispered.
It wasn't fear.
It was recognition.
We turned a corner, and the world shifted.
Suddenly, we were no longer in a tunnel—but standing at the edge of a ballroom.
A ballroom I remembered all too well.
Golden chandeliers. Marble floors. Music, frozen mid-note.
And at the center of it all—me.
Or rather, a past version of me. Evelyne Varethe in her first appearance: flawless, cruel, eyes glinting with malice. Standing poised with a glass of wine, about to humiliate the heroine in front of the entire nobility.
Alaira grabbed my arm. "Is this—?"
"The debutante ball," I breathed. "Chapter one. The start of the story."
Everything was perfectly in place.
Except for one thing.
There were two versions of me.
The real memory was frozen, a still-life of the written timeline. But in the shadow of a column, another Evelyne watched with wide, horrified eyes.
This one was trembling. She clutched the edge of a pillar like she might fall.
She was me—but not the version from the book. She was raw. Awake. Aware.
She was the first deviation.
My heart thundered.
I stepped forward, and she turned to look at me.
Her lips parted. "You came back."
My voice caught. "I… I don't remember being here."
"You don't remember this version," she corrected gently. "But it happened. We woke up that night. Just for a moment. We knew something was wrong—but we obeyed the script anyway."
I stepped closer. The frozen ballroom seemed to breathe around us.
"What did you do?" I asked.
She smiled bitterly. "I whispered a different line. Just one."
The scene began to melt forward in time. Slowly, like ink reabsorbing into a quill.
The heroine stumbled—tripped by a cruel remark from the "original Evelyne." Laughter echoed.
But then—
"You look pale, Lady Annette," the duplicate Evelyne said softly.
A line that wasn't in the book. It wasn't cruel. It wasn't mocking.
It was… human.
A pause.
The illusion shattered.
Glass cracked.
And the timeline buckled.
I gasped. "That was it? One change?"
The first deviation nodded. "That moment was enough. The Author noticed. He tried to erase me."
A shiver passed through the air. The room dimmed.
"He's coming again," she said urgently. "He thinks you're me. He's been chasing every echo of that deviation ever since."
I felt a deep ache behind my eyes—like something was trying to rewrite me even now.
"But why did we wake up?" I asked. "Why us?"
She looked at me then—not with fear, but with something deeper. Older.
"Because the story was never finished. He left holes in the world. Incomplete arcs. Unresolved lines. And in that void, we slipped through."
Alaira spoke up. "So we're living in a draft?"
The deviation smiled. "No. You're rewriting the final version. And that terrifies him."
Behind us, the shadows twisted.
The Author was near.
"Take this," she said, reaching into the fold of her memory. She handed me a page—yellowed, torn, but humming with power.
I glanced down and froze.
It was a scene that hadn't happened yet.
It showed me, kneeling beside a dying prince.
It showed Alaira, bleeding in my arms.
It showed a crown burning.
"This is how he ends it," she whispered. "Unless you write something else."
My voice shook. "How?"
"Use the quill. You've already been holding it."
I looked down at my hand.
And in my palm—no longer shaking—was a silver feather.
We barely made it out of the fading memory.
The quill burned cold against my fingers as the tunnel returned. The frozen ballroom cracked behind us like a broken mirror.
Alaira exhaled. "So what now?"
I looked at the page. At the death. The fire. The ending written for us.
"We find where he's writing from," I said. "We take back the ending."
"And if he fights?"
"Then we write something stronger."
High above us, beyond the boundary of the story, a figure dipped a pen into black ink.
The Author frowned.
"They found the deviation," he murmured.
A rustle behind him.
A shadow spoke: "Do you want me to erase them?"
He paused.
"No," he said slowly. "Let her write. Let her think she can change it."
His lips curled into a thin smile.
"That will make it all the more tragic… when she fails."