Every letter drifted in zero gravity.
Sentences floated like snakes. Paragraphs coiled and uncoiled. Meaning was sentient here.
Kai stepped forward and immediately choked on a sentence fragment that leapt into his throat, trying to become his voice.
“...I think, therefore I—”
COUGH.
He spat out the phrase as it wriggled on the ground and faded.
This was the Pre-Speech Engine—where thoughts are drafted by the universe itself before they are given sound, language, or law.
And it hated Kai.
Because he had rewritten so much, the system no longer trusted him.
A thunderous thrum shook the Node.
From the manuscript spiral, emerged a Construct-Archivist: half-librarian, half-executioner. Ink bled from its mechanical wings, and its face was blank parchment.
“Unauthorized Editor.
Violation: Over 1000 unsanctioned structural rewrites.
Proposed Penalty: Existential undoing.”
Kai smirked, flipping his hand to summon a new rewrite glyph—only for it to evaporate instantly.
“No glyphs?” he muttered. “Of course not. This is where glyphs are born.”
The Construct-Archivist struck first, whipping a semicolon blade across Kai’s chest, slicing open a sentence of his soul. The wound didn’t bleed blood—it bled intent.
The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
"I will never be weak again."
The phrase escaped him, trembling in the air.
The Scriptor Womb absorbed it gleefully.
“Declaration received,” it echoed. “Truth extracted. Vulnerability now stored.”
Kai stumbled. Every wound here took a belief.
"Okay..." he whispered. "I’ll fight without saying a word."
He danced through grammar storms and hypertext traps. He ducked a barrage of parenthetical missiles and parried a footnote hammer.
But the Construct-Archivist kept speaking:
“You are not an author.”
“You are an edit made flesh.”
“You are a comment that forgot it was never meant to remain.”
Kai spat out ink. But his eyes gleamed.
“Maybe. But comments see the truth the authors overlook.”
And then—he did something forbidden.
He opened his mouth and spoke a word that hadn’t been born yet.
“Unscribe.”
Reality paused.
The Construct trembled. The Scriptor Womb collapsed inward, trying to prevent the paradox from forming.
And in that glitch of divine lexicon, Kai struck.
Remove a written law of the universe before it was ever recorded. Requires sacrifice of a memory.
Kai watched as the Construct shattered like pages burnt mid-thought.
And then, from the wreckage, a memory drifted out of him—not torn, not forced.
But chosen.
He let go of a quiet, golden moment.
A time when he was twelve.
A small library. A girl sitting across from him, laughing.
The only time he ever laughed without irony.
He blinked. That moment was… gone.
But in its place?
A new glyph, burned into his palm.
Description: You may now instinctively act on rules that haven't been written yet—foreseeing laws before the universe does.
The Node quieted.
The spiraling manuscript slowed its turn.
A small, soft voice—one that hadn’t yet learned what sound was—spoke from within the pre-speech current:
“Are you… the author now?”
Kai didn’t answer.
He simply took one of the manuscript’s glowing threads and tied it around his wrist.
“I’m not the author,” he whispered. “I’m the warning scrawled in the margin.”
And he vanished.
End of Chapter 102