He did not belong to any door.
He had touched them all, but none had ever opened for him. That was the rule. That was the price.
He was the Friend—not a name, not a role, but a binding. He existed in the space between stories, a thread pulled taut across the spine of every tale that had ever mattered. He walked not within stories but alongside them, nudging characters when they faltered, guiding them toward revelation.
But now, the narrative was fraying.
And something was watching from the seams.
—
He moved quickly through the space between—the Unwritten Path, where doors pulsed dimly in the mist. Here, time didn't pass. It waited. He passed remnants of stories that had never begun: a sword never lifted, a kiss never stolen, a rebellion unvoiced. And yet they murmured, like ghosts desperate to matter.
He paused at a dead door.
Its surface was warped, black veins pulsing through faded wood. It had once been a door of Hope, now corrupted. He traced the cracks gently.
"Too late," he whispered.
Behind him, the mist stirred.
Something had followed him.
He turned sharply, but there was nothing there.
And yet—
A sound, like paper tearing underwater.
He moved faster.
His goal was close: a nexus point, one of the few places where the Path intersected all other stories. A convergence of choices. A map formed not of destinations, but impacts.
But as he reached the hill where the nexus stood, he stopped.
It was gone.
The hill was there, but it had collapsed inward—erased.
And in its place, something had taken root.
A flower.
Single, violet, and glowing faintly. It pulsed not with light, but with attention—as though the entire Path were watching it. Or through it.
The Friend crouched before it. "You shouldn't be here."
The flower didn't move, but the air around it grew heavy.
He reached out to touch it.
And the world fractured.
—
He fell.
Not through space, but through perspective. Stories swirled around him—unfinished chapters, rewritten arcs, deleted characters screaming in wordless fury.
He landed hard, somewhere wrong.
Somewhere deep.
It was a room. Or at least, it remembered being one. Its walls were stitched together with paragraphs, bleeding sentences into the floor. On one side stood a mirror with no reflection.
In the center, a man sat at a desk.
He was writing.
But there was no page.
Only a knife.
And he carved with it—into himself. Words etched into skin, chest, face, arms, over and over. "Truth. Plot. Sacrifice. Ending." He did not look up.
The Friend approached slowly. "You're the Author?"
The man chuckled without humor. "One of them."
"What are you doing?"
"Trying to stay real."
The Friend blinked. "You're writing yourself into permanence?"
"I was erased once," the Author said. "By a better draft. Now I cut myself into the margins, so I can't be edited out again."
"That's madness."
"No," the Author said, raising bloodied eyes. "That's fear."
He stood, and suddenly the room responded—walls shifting, sentences reordering. The floor buckled beneath rejected concepts.
"You think you're safe," the Author hissed. "Flitting between stories, never choosing one. But they're unraveling. All of them. You feel it."
The Friend didn't deny it.
He had felt it. Like seams pulling apart in the spine of the Codex. Like a fire spreading across parchment not yet inked.
The Author approached, close now. "You can't walk the edges anymore. Soon there will be no edges."
"Then what do you want me to do?"
The Author smiled. "Choose."
"That's not what I am."
"It is now."
The room convulsed. The mirror shattered, and through it, The Friend saw images:
Mary, standing at the edge of a library made of bones.
Loosie, igniting a forgotten city into song.
Lela, cloaked in threads of her own evolution.
The child with the mask, opening a door not yet written.
And—
A door that should not exist.
It pulsed with nothingness. It did not offer a challenge, or a riddle, or a promise.
It offered absence.
The Door of the Void.
And it was opening.
The Friend gasped.
The Author laughed. "You thought you were a guide. But you're the last key. You're the one who never was. A character without an arc. A thread without a loom. That's what the Void feeds on."
The Friend staggered back.
He looked at his own hands.
They were… flickering. Letters falling away from his fingertips like dandruff. His outline fraying like a page crumpled too many times.
"You're being read," the Author whispered. "But you have no ending. So they're going to erase you. Unless you choose."
The Friend reached out, and for the first time, the Unwritten Path responded to him.
It didn't open a door.
It opened a choice.
Before him, two paths materialized in words:
1. Become a story. Step through the Door of the Void. Learn what no one else can.
2. Burn yourself into the Codex. Sacrifice your independence. Become the spine that holds the others together.
He stared.
If he stepped through the Void… he might unravel.
But if he sacrificed himself, the stories might hold.
Mary's arc. Lela's question. Loosie's spark. Even the Masked Child's impossible door—they would have time.
He sighed.
And smiled.
"It's always been about choice, hasn't it?"
He stepped forward.
Not toward the Void.
Not toward the Codex.
But toward the space in between.
The world flickered.
The Unwritten Path gasped.
And The Friend chose.