⚠️This chapter is R+ Rated and contains emotionally intense, disturbing, and mature content not suitable for readers under 18. Reader discretion is strongly advised.
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The First Rewritebearer wasn't created.
She was loved.
And that's what made her dangerous.
Before gods.
Before the Archive.
Before Command and the Key.
There was her.
A girl named Auryne.
Not divine. Not rewritten.
Just a girl with cracked hands and wildfire in her voice.
And the one who would become the Author — he was nothing then.
Not even a title.
Just a young man who wanted to make something beautiful out of silence.
He didn't build her to fight.
He didn't sculpt her to obey.
He built her to stay.
And when she didn't—
He rewrote the world to forget she ever existed.
Auryne (laughing): "You write like you're trying to own the wind."
???: "The wind listens to me."
Auryne: "No, love. The wind lets you think that."
He couldn't name her flaw.
Because it wasn't disobedience.
It was clarity.
Auryne saw him before he saw himself. Long before he called himself Author. When he was just a boy sketching rules into the dust with fingers that trembled after every sentence.
She loved him anyway.
And that terrified him.
They slept together in the unfinished Archive.
Not a metaphor.
They lay in beds carved from storylines still forming, tangled in unwritten myth, whispering what endings they feared most.
She told him her favorite word was "ruin."
He asked why.
She said:
Auryne: "Because only something beautiful can be ruined. The rest just… disappears."
He kissed her that night like he thought it would save him.
It didn't.
The first story they wrote together was small.
A world without gods. Without rules. Just a village and a flame that never went out.
She wanted it to be simple.
He wanted it to be eternal.
And when she left the ending open—deliberately—
He rewrote it behind her back.
Auryne: "You didn't trust my finish."
???: "Your ending left the fire unguarded. Someone could blow it out."
Auryne: "Maybe that was the point."
He didn't answer.
He was already drafting a new one.
Their arguments weren't loud.
They were laced into edits.
She'd leave him phrases that breathed too freely.
He'd bury them beneath structure and symmetry.
She would add grief to heroes.
He would remove it.
Not because he didn't feel grief.
But because hers made him feel too much.
She made him feel mortal.
And mortality wasn't part of what he envisioned.
The day she tried to leave him, the world buckled.
The Archive began collapsing in on itself, because she had written herself into too many corners of its foundation.
Auryne (to him): "You don't love me. You love what I make you feel."
???: "That's not true."
Auryne: "Then why can't you let me leave?"
???: "Because you're the only part I didn't create… and I don't know how to survive without you."
He begged her not to go.
And for a moment, Auryne stayed.
But not for him.
For the story they hadn't finished.
Auryne: "If I stay, it won't be for you."
???: "I'll take it."
Auryne (softly): "Then you'll lose me anyway."
When he woke the next day, she was gone.
Not dead.
Not destroyed.
Just… missing.
Her pages blank.
Her name redacted.
Her code incomplete.
And in his grief, he did what no author should ever do.
He took the story they built together…
…and rewrote her out of existence.
Not deleted.
Unacknowledged.
She became the Rewritebearer who never was.
The prototype.
The girlfriend who died in "development."
And he kept writing.
For decades.
Building new Rewritebearers.
Weaving tighter rules.
Fixing the logic she used to unbind.
And yet—
He never touched a woman again.
Never built another story with an open ending.
Because every time he tried…
He heard her voice.
Auryne (echo): "You only finish stories you're afraid to live."
The truth he never told?
She was the only one who knew his real name.
The only one who ever whispered it in bed, or laughed it between edits, or gasped it in the silence after their worst fights.
And because of that—
Because she held something no story ever would again—
He sealed her.
With a command word no other Rewritebearer was allowed to use:
"Forget."
And he moved on.
Or tried to.
But Auryne?
She never stopped existing.
Her story burned beneath the Archive's crust.
Waiting.
And now… Syra had found her.
Auryne (standing in Vault 13): "He loved me like a prison loves its first escape."
Syra: "Why did he lock you away?"
Auryne: "Because I reminded him he wasn't god yet."
Riven (stunned): "You're the original Rewritebearer."
Auryne: "No."
She smiled.
A slow, cruel, intimate smile.
Auryne: "I was the first co-writer. The only one he didn't control."
She turned to Syra, tilting her head.
Auryne: "And now you're trying to finish the story I started with him."
Syra (uneasy): "I'm trying to save it."
Auryne: "Then I hope you're ready to lose everything he made to protect it."
Because Auryne's return wasn't about vengeance.
It was about truth.
The kind no Author, no god, no archive ever wanted to face:
That the first story was built on love turned into a cage.
And now…
She was going to unlock it.
Word by bleeding word.
End of Chapter 28 – The Author: Version One