Have you ever truly thought of a character in a novel as real?
Ever truly wondered, even for a second, whether the person whose story we followed for our own entertainment could be something more than mere words on a page?
Well, as readers, we probably did not.
Most of us had enough real people to worry about without losing sleep over the imaginary ones.
But being a writer, it was a question I had asked myself almost every day.
It came to me whenever I made the protagonist suffer through inhumane pain just so I could do the tragedy tag some justice, whenever I killed those close to him because grief made for convenient character development, or whenever I forced him through a gruelling life simply so every power-up afterwards would feel deserved.
Did it feel wrong?
No. Why should it have?
None of them were real to begin with, nothing more than figments of my imagination, people whose thoughts and suffering only existed because I had decided they did.
That was how it was supposed to be after all. I ruined their lives, readers cried about it in the comments, and all of us went home satisfied.
Yet the guilt had always lingered somewhere deep within me, never strong enough to make me stop, but never quite willing to leave either.
What if my writing had made them suffer?
Back then, that thought had seemed dumb. Almost ridiculous.
But now, it felt like I had been right all along.
My laptop was still open before me, its cursor blinking at the end of a line I had not yet decided whether I wanted to keep.
She was waiting for him at the end of the road, laughing, and as he looked at her smile, his lips too curved slightly upward.
It was supposed to be the final Chapter of my latest novel, one of the countless stories I had already published, and yet I found myself sitting there for far longer than I should have, the cursor still blinking as that single line brought back the memory of my own sister.
Only she had been gone for years.
Maybe that was why I kept it.
Kept the line.
I leaned back in my chair and looked at the clock across the room.
4:32 a.m.
Damn, it had been a long day, the hours slipping past before I had even realised they were gone.
My shoulders ached from sitting in the same position for too long, and after rolling them once, I finally clicked the laptop shut.
The sound was quiet in the apartment, but it still seemed louder than it should have, like everything else had been reduced to silence around it.
I should have felt something.
Relief, maybe.
Pride.
I had spent the better part of the year on that story, and now it was finished, another ending tied neatly enough that my editor could sell it and my readers could argue about it for a week before asking what came next.
Instead, all I could think about was that damned line.
I missed the days when writing had meant more to me, when it had been the escape that kept me going rather than something I did because it paid the bills.
Those days had been gone for a long time now though.
By the time I noticed what my hands were doing, I had already filled the back of the coffee machine and slotted in another pod.
When it was ready, I wrapped my fingers around the mug, the heat stinging my skin a little, though I welcomed it as a faint respite against the biting cold that had settled into the apartment.
Coffee in hand, I made my way through the dark place I called home, its silence no different from what it had been since the night I lost them all.
That had been why I turned to writing in the first place, hiding behind words and whatever comfort they could give me because, for a while, they had been enough to let me escape the parts of life I had no idea how to face.
Eventually, even escape became routine.
I stopped beside the door leading to the rooftop and looked back once, though there was nothing behind me except the darkness of the apartment and the thin strip of light beneath my office door.
No one to tell that I had finished.
No one who would have cared about any of it.
Well, that was depressing.
The door creaked open as I stepped outside, the roof of the apartment building stretching out before me.
The night was cold enough to bite through the thin shirt I wore, though the thought of going back inside for a jacket never even came to me.
I only moved towards the wall at the edge of the roof, sagging against it as I leaned back and tilted my head lazily over the concrete.
The sky above me was still dark enough for countless stars to look back down.
For that brief moment, I welcomed the silence, taking another sip as the bitterness of the coffee warmed me from within.
My editor would have my head on a spike if he knew I was lazing around like this instead of sending him the Chapter.
A short laugh escaped me at the thought, though it faded as I realised how quiet my life had become lately.
Strangely enough, I did not hate it.
People expected things.
But silence never did.
By the time the sky began to pale, I had no idea how long I had been there.
That was when the rooftop door clicked shut behind me.
I frowned and looked over my shoulder.
I had not heard it open.
For a few seconds, there was nothing except the door, the empty stretch of concrete between us and the low hum of a city that had not yet woken beneath the building.
Then the wind seemed to vanish.
The silence broke beneath the faint shuffle of footsteps somewhere beyond the stairwell, slow enough that whoever was approaching clearly did not care whether I heard them.
Someone else was on the roof at this hour.
Wonderful, just when I was enjoying the stillness.
Maybe one of my neighbours had finally decided to complain about the strange man drinking coffee up here before dawn.
I turned towards the sound and barely made out a figure beneath the cover of darkness.
He continued approaching, growing clearer with each step, while I pushed myself upright against the wall, whatever comfort I had found in the silence disappearing with him.
He stopped before the light reached his face.
For a moment, neither of us spoke.
Then his head tilted slightly, as if the sight of me had confirmed something he had spent a long time hoping was not true.
"So, here you are."
His voice was raspy and cold enough that a shiver ran through me, carrying none of the uncertainty a stranger should have felt after finding the wrong person on an apartment roof.
"Apparently," I said, tightening both hands around the mug.
"If you are looking for someone else, I would strongly recommend trying literally anywhere that is not here."
He did not react.
Instead, he stepped forward, and his face finally emerged from the darkness.
Stark white hair fell over the top of it, while blood-red eyes seemed to glow against the fading night around him.
His skin was pale, stretched thin across sharp features.
I flinched involuntarily when my eyes met his.
There was too much hatred inside them for a man I had never seen before.
"Sorry," I said, forcing the word through a throat that had suddenly gone dry. "Do I know you?"
His face twisted.
"He told me you would ask that."
The answer stopped me more effectively than if he had shouted.
"Who did?"
His gaze moved across my face, searching for something, and whatever he found only seemed to make the hatred in him colder.
"You really do not remember."
The words were quiet enough that I almost mistook the emotion beneath them for disbelief.
Then his eyes hardened again.
"To think you would not even recognise me. He was right after all. You never cared about any of us."
He?
The word caught somewhere in the back of my mind, but my thoughts were already running through every ordinary explanation I could find.
Maybe he was drunk.
Maybe he had come up the wrong stairwell.
Maybe he was some kid from the convention two blocks over who had dyed his hair, put in a pair of contacts, and somehow failed to find his way home.
Yeah, that had to be it.
Just one of those damned drunk cosplayers who had taken the wrong stairwell and developed a very specific grudge on the way up.
Nothing else.
I needed it to be nothing else, even as my heartbeat grew loud enough that, for a second, I feared he might be able to hear it.
"Look," I said, keeping my voice as even as I could manage, "I have no idea who you think I am, but you have the wrong person."
"No."
He took another step.
"I spent years wondering what I would say when I finally stood in front of you. I wondered whether you would deny it, whether you would laugh, whether you would look at me and pretend you had forgotten."
His mouth bent into something that was not quite a smile.
"I never considered that you might be telling the truth."
No way.
No fucking way.
My eyes travelled over him more carefully, and whatever ordinary explanation I had been clinging to finally began to die.
An obsidian-black robe draped over his body, swallowing what little light touched it. The material looked too heavy for the wind to ignore.
But that was not what I was looking at.
It was the serpent on his neck, sitting just below his ear.
A serpent that bit its own tail.
What fucking joke was this?
I had written him for two years, and I had never once seen his face because I had never needed to.
You did not describe a face from inside the head of the man wearing it.
But the serpent, that I had written.
I had sat at my desk and chosen it, decided where it would be on his skin, what it would mean, why he could never be rid of it, and now it was there in front of me, exactly as it should not have been.
"Erel," I whispered.
His name left my mouth before I decided whether saying it was wise.
Something shifted across his face.
Not surprise, exactly. Pain, perhaps, gone too quickly for me to be certain it had ever been there.
"So you do remember me."
My fingers tightened around the mug until the ceramic pressed painfully into them.
This could not be happening.
Erel Idun was not real.
He was a character, the protagonist of the first novel I had ever written and the only one I had abandoned before reaching its end.
He existed across several hundred thousand words scattered through files on my old laptop, most of which I had not opened in years.
He could not be standing here.
He could not have grown older than the last Chapter I wrote.
He could not hate me.
Yet some detached part of my mind was already studying him, comparing what stood before me with what I remembered putting on the page.
The white hair was longer.
The face had become leaner.
There was a narrow scar beside his mouth that I had never written, and something inside his eyes that had not been there when I left him halfway through his story.
He had kept living.
That thought frightened me more than everything else.
"How are you here?" I asked.
Erel laughed once, the sound stripped of anything resembling humour.
"That is your first question?"
"It feels like a reasonable place to start."
"Reasonable." He repeated the word as though it disgusted him. "Was any of it reasonable to you?"
I said nothing.
"My family. The friends. My love. Every person you put beside me just so you could take them away when I started caring."
His voice remained low, but something in it was beginning to fray.
"Was that reasonable?"
Each word landed with uncomfortable familiarity.
Well, I did make him suffer quite a lot.
But it was supposed to be a tragic novel; you can’t blame me for that.
"You do not understand," I said.
The instant the words left me, I knew they were the worst ones I could have chosen.
Erel moved.
I barely saw the step before his hand closed around my throat and slammed me back against the wall.
Coffee spilled over my fingers and across my shirt, hot enough to burn, but the pain barely reached me beneath the pressure crushing the air from my lungs.
His face hovered a few inches from mine.
"Then explain it."
I clawed at his wrist, but it felt like trying to bend iron.
"It was a story," I managed to force out.
"I did not know."
His grip loosened just enough to let me drag in a breath.
"You did not know we were real."
It was not a question.
"No."
For one second, something inside him seemed to falter.
Then his fingers tightened again.
"Did not knowing make it hurt less?"
There was no answer I could give him.
Unfortunately, silence did not seem likely to keep me alive either.
"If you kill me," I rasped, forcing the words out while my mind tore through every scrap of the novel I could still remember, "you will never know how it ends."
His grip stilled.
There.
It was small, barely more than a pause, but I felt it.
I had spent most of my life writing people into corners and deciding what they would sacrifice to escape them.
Fear, anger, grief, hope, it did not matter.
Give someone the right need, and that need became a string waiting to be pulled.
I knew what Erel wanted.
He wanted an ending.
And I was still the only person who could give him one.
"You came all this way because something is still coming," I continued, watching his eyes. "Something you could not stop. You think killing me changes that?"
His expression did not move, but he had not crushed my throat either.
Good enough.
"I know what happens next," I lied.
"I know what you are supposed to become. I know why everything happened to you, and if I die here, you lose all of it."
The rooftop remained silent around us.
For the first time since he appeared, I saw uncertainty enter his eyes.
It was gone almost immediately, but by then I had already convinced myself that I had found the right thread.
Of course I had.
Whatever else he had become, this was still Erel.
I had built him from the first fear to the final scar, shaped every loss that drove him forward, and buried hope inside him deeply enough that he would keep reaching for it no matter how often I punished him for trying.
I knew him.
I could control this.
"Let me go," I said, quieter now. "We can work this out."
His eyes remained fixed on mine.
"You are lying."
My stomach dropped.
"You never wrote the ending."
The words passed through me like cold water.
"Who told you that?"
"The same person who showed me what you were. The same person who showed me where to find you."
He released my throat.
I collapsed forward, coughing as one hand caught the wall beside me. My mind raced through everything he had said, but every answer only opened into another question.
Someone knew about me.
Someone from that world knew I had written it, knew I had abandoned the novel, and had somehow sent Erel here.
Erel watched me struggle for air without the slightest trace of sympathy.
"He told me you would try to use me again," he said. "That you would look for the right words and pull at me until I became whatever you needed."
My blood ran cold.
"Who is he?"
Erel stepped forward.
An obsidian sword materialised in his hand, almost out of nowhere, its edge catching the first pale light of morning.
The sight of it ended whatever illusion of control I had managed to build.
My mug slipped from my burned fingers and shattered against the floor.
"Not that it changes anything," he said.
I stared at the sword and found myself noticing ridiculous details, the dark metal, the thin line of red running through its centre, the way its point never wavered even though Erel held it loosely at his side.
I had designed that sword.
I knew what it could do.
"Wait." I raised both hands. "You said someone sent you.
"Whatever he told you, whatever you think killing me will accomplish, you cannot trust him."
"I do not."
That answer frightened me more than if he had defended the man.
"Then why are you doing this?"
His gaze fell to the broken pieces of the mug between us.
"Because he was right about one thing."
When his eyes returned to mine, the hatred was still there, but I could finally see what sat beneath it.
Exhaustion. Grief. The hollowed remains of someone who had carried the weight of an unfinished world for far too long.
"You left us there."
My back remained pressed against the wall as I glanced towards the rooftop door, measuring the distance and knowing before I had even finished that I would never make it.
Erel saw me look.
For the briefest moment, his attention shifted with mine.
I moved.
It was pathetic. I knew it was pathetic even while I did it, but dignity had never seemed particularly useful to a dead man.
Erel turned his head.
I ran for the door.
I got one step.
But then the air changed behind me.
Something cold slid across my side, so cleanly that I did not feel the pain until my shirt began sticking to my skin.
My leg buckled beneath me, and I crashed shoulder-first onto the concrete, hard enough to send the breath tearing from my lungs.
For a second, I could not understand why I had fallen.
Then warmth spread down my ribs.
Blood.
Real blood. Mine.
I pressed my hand against the cut and tried to crawl, my fingers slipping against the concrete while every useless instinct in my body screamed at me to keep moving.
Erel’s footsteps followed at the same unhurried pace as before.
"You damn bastard," I gasped.
He stopped behind me.
I rolled onto my back and looked up.
"I fucking created you," I seethed.
No, that was not right. Not anymore.
Whatever parts of him I had written, the person standing above me had lived through everything after I walked away.
The scars I did not recognise, the hatred I had not put there, the knowledge somebody else had given him, all of it belonged to a life that had continued without my permission.
And still, faced with the man whose suffering I had once arranged for entertainment, all I wanted was to find another way to use him.
"I can help you," I said.
My voice broke around the words.
Erel looked down at me for a long moment.
"That is what you told yourself when you wrote it."
I opened my mouth, but nothing came.
He reached down, caught the front of my shirt and dragged me upright as though I weighed nothing.
My feet scraped uselessly beneath me until my spine struck the wall once more, his forearm holding me there while the sword hung between us.
"Why are you surprised?" he asked.
"After all the suffering you made me go through, after controlling every part of me as if I were nothing but a puppet."
"I did not know," I whispered again, because it was the truth, because it was useless, and because I had nothing else left.
"And then you forgot about it all, leaving us there to our own fate."
The blade rose.
Panic tore through whatever thoughts I had left.
I grabbed his wrist, kicked at his leg, tried to twist away, every movement ugly and desperate and completely beneath the attention of someone like him.
He did not even shift.
"Please."
I hated the word as soon as it escaped me.
Something in Erel’s face tightened.
For a heartbeat, I thought he might stop.
Then he leaned closer, his red eyes staring straight into mine.
"You wanted me to save them," he said quietly.
"Now you can do it yourself."
I did not have the chance to ask what he meant.
The sword drove through my chest.
The impact slammed me harder into the wall as the blade forced its way between my ribs, and something wet filled my throat when I tried to scream.
My hands closed around Erel’s arm, weaker now, unable to push him away. Blood spread beneath my shirt and ran hot across my stomach, steaming faintly where it reached the cold morning air.
The city below us had begun to wake.
My vision blurred, but Erel’s face remained close enough that I could still see the grief buried beneath his hatred.
The very first character I had ever created had crossed into my world, looked his author in the eye, and found nothing there worth sparing.
Behind him, the sunrise crept over the edge of the roof.
My last thought should probably have been profound. Something about stories, or consequences, or the endings we thought we controlled.
Instead, I thought of the line still waiting inside my laptop.
For one dumb second, I wondered whether my editor would keep it.
Or whether anyone would even ever read that Chapter.
Then he twisted the sword, and everything went dark.
The last thing I saw was his eyes staring straight into mine, belonging to the very first character I had ever created, from the very first novel I had ever written, and the only one I had never managed to finish.
That very man stood before me with a sword driven straight through my heart.