The train hissed like a serpent as it pulled into the outer district station — one no one used unless they had reason to revisit the past.
Mira Elwood stepped onto the cracked platform with a single photo in her pocket and a name on her lips that no longer existed in the public eye.
Edric Vale.
---
The Ruins
She walked three blocks under a sky smeared with gray. The streets here hadn't been repaved in years. Broken windows lined apartment buildings like tired eyes. The address Edric had died at — or rather, the man she believed had become Jalen — was barely marked now. The building was long gone.
Just a blackened foundation behind a rusted chain-link fence. Weeds clawed their way through the ash-caked soil, and something in the air still smelled of smoke, even after five years.
She looked at the photo again. A scorched page from a journal, its edges burned. But the ink remained untouched. Below the fragmented handwriting, a message had been scribbled:
> "Meet me at the place where I died."
She stepped past the fencing.
The air felt… thicker here.
Not heavy like weather. Heavy like memory.
---
Liora – Cracks in the Veneer
Liora stared at her study's walls as if they were beginning to breathe.
Pages from her early drafts lay scattered across the carpet. Some of them had changed. The dialogue was tighter. Phrases were replaced with ones Edric had once used. And then there were the annotations—always in red ink, in handwriting she could no longer deny.
She picked up a page and read a note scribbled in the margin:
> "Your words lie. Mine never needed to."
She tore it in half. But when she turned to the bookshelf, the same line appeared inside the printed copy of her novel.
She opened another copy.
Same thing.
"No."
She pulled them all off the shelf in a frenzy. The floor was a snowfall of her own covers, accusing her.
She stumbled back.
Then her doorbell rang.
---
Mira and Jalen – At the Ashes
He was already there when Mira arrived.
Standing at the center of the blackened lot, eyes closed.
She didn't call his name — didn't need to.
He opened his eyes, and the wind stirred around them.
"You sent the photo?" she asked.
"No," he said. "But I knew you'd come."
"Then who?"
"I think… it was the part of me that remembers."
She stepped closer. "This is where it happened? Where you—he—died?"
He nodded. "The fire started in the manuscript drawer. Some thought it was arson. Others said suicide. But only two people knew the truth."
"You and Liora."
Silence stretched between them like a taut string.
Mira looked down at the ground. "What do you remember, Jalen?"
He tilted his head. "Everything and nothing. Faces without names. Emotions without context. But when I write—"
He tapped his chest.
"—I know who I was. I feel it come back. Not as a ghost. As a story I didn't finish."
She looked at the foundation around them. The skeletal remains of a life.
"Do you want revenge?" she asked.
"No," he said, softer now. "I want restoration. I want the truth to be louder than the lie."
---
Liora's Visitor
When she opened the door, no one was there.
Just a single package on her doorstep.
No postage. No name.
She carried it inside with trembling hands.
Inside, she found a charred notebook.
She recognized it instantly.
Edric's final journal.
It had been lost in the fire. She'd told the press everything was destroyed.
But here it was.
She opened it.
The ink had bled, scorched, and curled — but one passage had survived. And it was addressed to her.
> "If this book lives, then I do too.
You took my voice.
Now I take back my breath."
Her hands dropped it like it was a snake.
And the room grew cold.
---
The Fire Begins Again
Back at the lot, Jalen stood where the writing desk used to be.
He knelt and touched the black soil.
The memory came in a rush.
Liora. The argument. Her walking out with his manuscript. The door left ajar. The drawer pulled open. The spark from the faulty lamp cord.
The flames had licked the walls like they were hungry.
He had tried to save the stories, not himself.
Now, he whispered into the ashes.
"I forgive you."
The ground stirred.
Mira gasped.
A small ember flickered in the soil.
And then — impossibly — a piece of unburned paper rose into the air like it had never been touched by flame.
Mira caught it.
It was a dedication page.
In Edric's handwriting.
"To the writer I once was. To the voice I will be again."
---
Back at Liora's
Liora lit a match and dropped it into the journal.
It did not burn.
The flame flickered once and died.
She grabbed lighter fluid, poured it across the pages.
Lit it again.
The fire whooshed — then hissed and went out.
She stared in disbelief.
Then red ink bled across the front cover, spelling a single phrase:
> "You can't destroy what you already buried alive."
---
That night, Mira uploaded an anonymous article to The Literary Flame.
Title: "The Ghostwriter Among Us"
Content:
A side-by-side comparison of Edric Vale's early works and Jalen Thorn's recent pieces. Uncanny similarities. Too precise to be coincidence. No accusations. Just questions.
At the bottom, she included the dedication page.
The story was beginning to spread.
The ashes were whispering again.
And they had a name.
---
✒️ End of Chapter 5