BAB 1 – The Omitted
The book did not begin with a name.
It began with an absence.
It was not written in ink, but in forgetting.
And the first to be forgotten was Rael.
He was never in the cast list.
Never described in the outline.
Yet somehow, he moved —
between lines, across pages, like a shadow unsure of its source.
"I was never born in this world.
I arrived when the last sentence faltered."
— Rael, the Unsummoned
The Nameless Scribe had never meant to write him.
And yet—
the parchment bled
where Rael walked.
[Hidden Note – Left Margin]
"I saw him, once. Just before my scene was cut."
"He carried no name, only a page torn from something older."
He did not speak at first.
He listened.
To the silence between the lines.
To the ink that curled and cracked under time.
The world around him — brittle.
A realm built by a pen that no longer moved.
Laws half-written. Skies uncoloured.
Time flickering like a broken lantern.
He touched a broken paragraph and whispered:
"If no one writes me…
then I will write myself."
And the world shuddered.
[Unreferenced Footnote]
¹: The moment Rael spoke, six names vanished from the original draft. No one remembers who they were.
The Scribe paused —
or perhaps the Scribe was no longer in control.
Because now the book began to answer back.
Pages warped.
Margins twisted.
And words not written by any hand
began to appear.
Voices from the Cut
"He wasn't supposed to exist."
"But neither were we."
"They cut me after my first line."
"But I still remember my ending."
"Rael is not one of us."
"But he carries our hunger."
Rael stood at the edge of a chapter never opened.
He held a quill not dipped in ink—
but in remainder.
And with a voice never listed,
he wrote a single line
on a page that refused to stay blank:
"Let those who were erased remember themselves."
And they did.
They began to stir
beneath the spine.
"Fine Scribbles – At the Edge of a Torn Page"
There, the last ink wept.
Upon the margin the world forgot.
Between fractured lines and whispers never read.
"He found the list."
"Not the cast list the Author wrote…
but the one the Author was too afraid to finish."
TO BE CONTINUED...
In this chapter, Rael is not only introduced, but also activates the consciousness of the erased characters — making him the catalyst for the narrative rebellion.