The Grave of Prologues did not welcome them, it remembered them.
Every step the group took echoed like a confession, their footfalls stirring specters of abandoned intentions and unsent drafts. The valley was more than a tomb, it was a reflection, each gravestone a mirror catching slivers of forgotten versions of themselves.
Some stones whispered with audio commentary, others flickered between rejected covers. Some trembled with the remnants of climaxes never reached.
Oren clutched the thread-drive to his chest, its pulse syncing erratically with the thrum of the great Eye of Narrative ahead. "Keep moving," he said. "This place feeds on hesitation. It devours the uncertain and embalms the uncommitted."
His voice quavered despite his words.
Juno scowled as she passed a jagged slab: Juno Variant 2.7: Tone-deaf Bard. The tombstone bore an etched version of her face, older, wearier. She kicked it over. It cracked like brittle dialogue.
"Screw you too," she muttered.
"Don't engage," Rafael warned. He brushed streaks of spectral ink off his cloak as if shedding genre constraints. "They want us to mourn possibilities. But we're not ghosts, remember? We're the editors wannabe."
The Eye grew closer, its form vast and sublime, suspended over the center of the Grave like a divine ellipsis. It pulsed in rhythm with their unspoken thoughts, flickering with unfinished paragraphs and twitching lines of potential.
"How do we reach it?" Lira asked, shielding her eyes from the rising static of narrative pressure.
"We write our way in," Mira murmured, already etching glyphs into the air. Her fingers moved fast, conjuring radiant runes (verbs, metaphors, paradoxes) all fusing into a bridge made of pure authorial intent. Each glowing syllable formed a step forward.
A gust tore through the valley. The wind howled with old reviews, harsh commentary embedded with shame and sarcasm. The remnant of one of the outer being in this thread:
"Unfocused!"
"Derivative!"
"Characters lacked depth!"
The words slapped them like memory-laden hail. Bryn snarled, whipping her red thread into the fog, slicing hostile syntax. "One more insult and I'll give this valley a plot twist."
They pushed forward.
The bridge took shape beneath their feet, shifting with every step. It wasn't solid, it was personal.
Each plank bore a phrase from their own stories: shards of dialogue, mistakes, promises. Rafael stopped at one that read: "She never got to hear me say it." He knew what it means, that's why he stepped past it without a word.
The Eye responded.
A ripple spread outward, summoning a guardian.
It wasn't a monster. It was a Draft.
A towering, malformed echo of themselves, stitched together from concept art, outdated skillsets, cringeworthy backstories, old personalities.
It bore Mira's first arrogance, Juno's cynical aloofness, Rafael's smug detachment, Bryn's unbalanced overdrive, Lira's pre-rewrite flatness. Even Oren's indecision glimmered in its jittering gaze.
"It's us," Oren whispered. "The versions we scrapped."
The Draft roared, a scream of exposition, lore dumps, and filler arcs, and lunged.
Bryn leapt to meet its blade, red thread hissing through the air like a snare drum solo. Sparks flew as she locked weapons with herself. "Finally. Some goddamn closure!"
Juno rolled left, her newly-acquired lute spitting bullets of concise resolution like a rifle. She fired into its knee, disrupting a subplot about her abandonment issues.
Mira and Lira formed a sigil loop, reinforcing each other's casting with recursive harmonics. Layers of magical syntax folded around them, shielding against emotional regression.
Rafael vaulted forward, stabbing a sarcastic dagger into the Draft's foot.
"I liked brooding Rafael!" the Draft bellowed.
"He was short and wore too much eyeliner!" Rafael shot back.
The battlefield warped. Dialogue bled into the sky. Gravity twisted, weighed down by thematic overload. Subtext began to drip from the clouds like thick disgusting substance.
"Watch out!" Mira cried, pulling Lira from a collapsing monologue about childhood dreams.
The air screamed with abandoned exposition and canceled arcs. Outlines burst like mines. Red thread snapped taut in Bryn's hand as she redirected a collapsing plot twist that would have killed three of them for poetic symmetry.
The Draft split itself, generating alternate versions of the team mid-battle. Lira faced her duller self from a scrapped romance subplot, who tried to guilt-trip her with monologues about missed chances.
Mira faced a version of herself obsessed with symbolism over coherence.
Rafael's alternate smirked too much and quoted Nietzsche out of context.
Bryn clashed midair with a berserker version of herself that screamed in tropes. "Oh come on! You had no arcs!"
Juno's counterpart posed dramatically and delivered lines in Shakespearean prose. Juno just shot her in the foot.
Oren ducked and weaved through the chaos, reading the rhythm of the fight like syntax. His instincts sharpened with each beat. He didn't dodge plot holes; he rewrote the terrain. He wasn't fighting for dominance. He was proofread-ing.
The bridge cracked.
"This isn't a fight," Oren gasped, ducking under a swinging subplot. "It's a draft review. We're not here to defeat it. We're here to revise it."
He sprinted forward, thread-drive in hand.
The team screamed warnings, but he didn't stop. He dove beneath the Draft's lunge, planted his feet, and thrust the thread-drive into the creature's chest.
"You mattered," he whispered to it. "But you were never the ending."
The Draft convulsed. Light burst from its seams. Dialogue spiraled free. Moments; some cringe-worthy, some honest, broke loose like fireflies. The fragments rose and fused into the Eye, absorbed not as errors but as experience.
The Draft shed ink-tears and dissolved.
Silence returned.
The Eye hovered low now, pulsing slowly, warm with acceptance.
Oren turned to the others, breathless. "We stabilize it with unity. No contradictions. No false starts. We write the core, a shared journey. One narrative."
Lira wiped her eyes. "Then let's write the hell out of it."
They formed a circle.
Bryn bound their wrists with red thread. Mira summoned glowing runes. Juno loaded her rifle (lute, actually) with affirmations. Rafael held a blank page like a flag. Oren placed the thread-drive into the Eye's heart.
They began.
Word by word. Memory by memory. Not perfect, not painless—but true.
They wrote their way forward.
They wrote themselves whole.
The Eye expanded, becoming a sphere of luminous ink. It spun with gravitational prose, drawing in the valley's fog and rearranging it into a living outline of what came next.
Far above, the clouds cracked, revealing a starry horizon made of sequels, footnotes, and the occasional bonus chapter.
And the Grave of Prologues exhaled, its monuments dimming, not in defeat but in rest.
They stepped through the Eye.
And the next chapter waited.
***