Ahab looks Tom dead in his eyes, Ahab's eyes filled with a glimpse of determination and anger.
"I'll take your offer. Because for the first time, let me write something about myself. Throughout my pathetic life I always hear everyone around me narrate my life… Tell me what to do and whatever I do, fates always make me The Son of a Madman" said Ahab.
He continued, "Even after all that I've done for them, they still decide who I am. Son of Captain Ahab of The Pequod. An Obsessive madman over a white whale who now I know was written wholly by a different man, an author."
Tom looks at him with a little grin. Feels proud and already knows what Ahab's choices are.
"One chance."
"This One chance only…"
"I'M GONNA WRITE IT MYSELF!"
"Neither the Book authors, the navy, Captain Jones, Everyone in Nantucket.
Nor. My. Father.
That will decide My whole story." said Ahab
"I am EliasAlexandrianne Ahab, though my fate is written, my story ends here and I become an entity that is unwritten in vast sea of stories"
Ahab takes the Pen and the blank book that are given by Tom and starts to write in it.
Tom asked "did you have any plan on how to stop Jones and end your story? Or are you planned to enter and fuck it, we balled?"
"Do not worry Mister Taylor, I'm a captain, I always have planned," said Ahab while smiling.
Then after Ahab put a full stop in the books. The words in the books become golden and every letter that inside the books transform and make everything around Ahab is changing. The line that Ahab wrote using the pen is in full effect.
In The middle of the wreckage ship, Captain Jones is celebrating while seeing Ahab's corpse floating in the sea water. He laughs that he has killed a legend and intends to continue to hunt and kill every storybook legend.
"Get that dog over here! I want to feel the pride of standing atop a storybook character! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAH"
The Black Leviathan crew immediately brought Ahab's lifeless body to Captain Jones. Captain Jones, standing victorious, his boot pressed on Ahab's seemingly dead body, sneered down at him.
"Another legend dies like a dog," he muttered.
But then, A voice came from behind him.
"Legend, yes. But whose story are you reading, Jones?"
Jones spun around. Eyes wide.
Ahab stood behind him. Alive.
"What the hell?! How are you still alive when your body is under my boots?!?" shout Captain Jones.
"I don't know, maybe because like you say." said Ahab while locking his eyes with Captain Jones and drew his saber from his waist.
Captain Jones replied, "What did I say?"
Ahab run towards Jones with saber in his hand try to attack Jones while saying "You say, that it is MY STORY!"
Jones instinctively fired his mechanical blaster but the bolt passed through Ahab, and the figure flickered away like smoke.
"Wha-... What?!?" Jones say under his breath.
Suddenly, another Ahab lunged from the left. Jones blocked with his metal arm, slicing the attacker across the chest …only for the body to vanish again.
Then another.
And another.
A dozen Ahab apparitions from different angles, different stances, some older, some younger, all echoing one thing:
"You don't get to write the end of my story."
The cycle does not end and Jones is overwhelmed by Ahab that keeps coming back after getting killed many and many times.
Jones began to panic. He fired wildly into the smoke and shadows, his breathing ragged.
"What are you?!" he roared.
From somewhere unseen, Ahab's voice answered:
"I am the ink you cannot smudge."
Jones staggered. Sweat dripped from his brow. He turned to the original body, the one he had assumed dead from the start.
Still unmoving. Still face-down.
Jones laughed nervously. "At least you're—"
STAB.
A searing pain burst in his leg. He looked down—a blade piercing through his thigh.
The body he thought lifeless had never died. The true Ahab, hidden among illusions of his rewritten fates, had used the pen to strategically script every outcome.
The real Ahab rose slowly from beneath him, bloodstained but standing tall.
"I used your arrogance," he muttered, "and rewrote the ending you thought you deserved."
Jones fell to his knees. The illusions faded. The battlefield stood still.
"Please, I am from another universe that's more futuristic and powerful. I can give you whatever you want!" begged Jones, who was once a smug and arrogant pirate that came from another land, that try to disrupt the narrative using his futuristic power, now panting bleeding trying to ask for mercy.
"Where the smugness goes "The Kraken"? Once your story does not follow your narration, you lose every attitude and motive you had before? Pathetic!" say Ahab with a bit of anger.
"I just want to gain this power to stop any storybooks from being created, man! I don't like to read books but in my world, to become a top person you need to read a lot of books to become smart! I'm have talent in robotics but never got far because I am too lazy to read, especially storybooks like yours!" Jones continued.
"That sound… like a YOU problem" state Ahab.
Ahab continued, "You don't have any right to end someone's story. Every person it's their own stories. They decide the beginning and ending of it. That's why you do not know because you don't even want to read. So, how can you determine if someone's story needs to end when you yourself can't read others' stories?"
"FUCK YOU!" shout Captain Jones desperately while trying to aim his mechanical hand toward Ahab.
Ahab wasted no time to swing his saber to stab the chest of Captain Jones before he could fire his mechanical hand. Jones vomits blood from his mouth and dies after Ahab takes the saber out of his body with no last word.
Ahab looks around after finishing Jones. The aftermath of this war that shouldn't be happened in the first place.
The sea was calm. Too calm. No cheering, no songs of victory. Only silence.
The Black Leviathan fleet was gone, its fire snuffed out, its cult broken. Ahab stood on the deck of the "Son of the Exiles", his coat torn, his face scarred, and eyes empty.
His ship floated among the wreckage, sails barely clinging to the wind. No other navy vessel came. No praise. No salute. He turned to the water where he had bled, fought, and rewritten fate while muttering "There is no turning back, this story ends here.".
He closes his eyes deeply then when he opens his eyes, he awoke in the Library again.
Bookshelves stretched infinitely into the void of stars and parchment. The smell of ink and time was overwhelming. Tom Taylor stood at the edge of the desk, arms folded, eyes somber.
Tom greeted him, "You're back. I figured you'd come."
Ahab replied, "…They're gone. All of them. My ship. My men. Even the Leviathan fleet. It's like… they never existed."
"They didn't. Not anymore." Tom.
Ahab's brow furrowed. "What do you mean?"
Tom sighed and walked over to a nearby shelf. He ran his hand over where a book once was, dust falling through his fingers. Tom continued, "Your story… was part of the collective narrative. It was a story that shouldn't exist but it still was being created, so it has an author from the collective mind of human consciousness. But when you rewrote your fate with the Pen, you didn't just change your ending, you broke the spine of your book. The tale unraveled. And with it... that reality."
The tale of the Son of Madman now doesn't exist anymore. The books turned to ashes.
Ahab gasped and tried to collect all the book pieces that had flown together with the wind but, its already too late. Ahab took a step back. His chest burned, not from the wound but from loss. Even if he doesn't have a beautiful memory from all his life in the story, the world he lived there is still meaningful to him especially when he is taking care of his mother, his crew that is filled with rejects but still followed his orders and a very few sweet memories more.
"So I've destroyed… my world?"
Tom replied "It's not your world anymore. You've become something else."
Tom turned and looked Ahab in the eye.
"You're Unwritten now."
The library dimmed slightly. Ahab looked at his own reflection in the glass of a display case.
No longer ragged, nor glowing with destiny. Just… undefined.
Ahab replied, "…What does that even mean?"
"It means you're not bound to one story. You're no longer a chapter in a book. You're a free agent in the narrative space. Dangerous… powerful… but lost." Tom, seeing Ahab suddenly felt guilty to end everything in his story.
Ahab sat down heavily in a reading chair. He didn't feel free. He felt erased.
Tom saw the weight behind his eyes. So, he did what he always did when things got heavy, he told a story.
Tom continued, "You know, my father, Wilson Taylor, is a famous author. Every book lover knows him. He created a best selling book that I might say the whole world read. The main characters from his book are named and characterized after me. All so I could fight The Cabal to free human storytelling and fantasy from being controlled by them. They used Leviathan, an ancient meta-entity, a whale-like force that feeds on human belief in stories.
Not unlike your father's Moby Dick… but infinitely more terrifying."
Ahab started to look up to Tom while hearing Tom's story.
Tom added more with, "For years, I thought my father cared more about his books and character than me. I thought I was just a character rather than his own son but, I still proud of what he have done. Everything in my life change until I started to realize he set me for greater purposes. To Write the people narratives free, to write ME free"
He placed a hand on Ahab's shoulder.
"You did that too. You write yourself free. And now, you can never go back."
"Because you are set for a greater purpose. That's why it chose you." Tom pointed his finger upward. Ahab looks up to where Tom points and sees a White Whale swimming in nothingness on top of the library. The white whale was humming towards them. The humming isn't a threat, it is an approval.
"Moby Dick." Ahab said under his breath.
Ahab looks back down and thinking about everything Tom said. After a while, he looks like he had doubt but he already make his decision. Even though he could still hear the creak of his mother's rocking chair, still see the old salty streets of Nantucket but, he realized there are must be reason why he he had being chosen to change his own ending, to change his own fated and to being chose as an Unwritten. The whale just can let him die like how his father's story ends but, it chose to give him an option rather to change or to end.
He looks at Tom and says, "So what now? " Am I just… a ghost wandering ink and paper?"
Tom smiled faintly. "Not a ghost. A blank page. And blank pages? They become anything."