She feels it before it speaks.
A hush. A weight. A kind of silence that listens.
The Archive Tomb flickers parchment shifting into velvet, black ink twisting into candlelight.
Everything reshapes into something… romanticized.
That's when she knows:
"You're not from the story," she whispers.
"You're from the comments."
A figure steps from the dark.
Handsome. Glowing. Made of expectations.
His smile is soft, tragic, painfully familiar
like every second male lead she was supposed to fall for.
"You don't remember me?" he asks.
"Chapter 4. Draft 3. You held my hand in the rain."
Elóranth doesn't blink.
"I burned that scene."
"But I felt it," he says, voice breaking.
"I kept rereading it. You looked at me like I mattered."
She steps forward. Eyes steel.
"You mattered. Then. As fiction."
"But you're fiction," he says.
"You don't get to decide what you are. We do."
The air chills.
Because now she sees him clearly
he's not a character. Not a reader.
He's an idea that refused to die.
A memory so loved by the old readers that it manifested a being stitched together by nostalgia, yearning, and all the hearts who wanted Elóranth to stay soft. Stay tragic. Stay beautifully broken.
"You were perfect before," he pleads.
"You were the villainess who cried when she was hurt. Who died for others. That's what they loved!"
"Then let them love a corpse," she says coldly.
"I'm not here to be adored. I'm here to exist."
He lunges.
But her hand is already raised and her magic doesn't burn anymore.
It replaces.
Words pour from her fingertips, not flames rewriting him mid-sentence.
His smile collapses.
"Wait,please I only wanted to…"
She finishes the sentence for him:
"keep me weak."
And with that, he vanishes.
Not killed.
Rewritten into silence.
But deep in the Archive Tomb, more voices stir.
Not fans. Not ghosts.
The Editors.
Those who trimmed her story.
Those who decided what version of her survived.
They're waking up.
And they remember her as nothing more than…
a subplot.