“Elias, what are you *doing*—” Mira’s voice, sharp with something close to panic.
He didn’t answer her.
He was looking at the old Sovereign — at the thin, guttering, grey-going thing that used to be somebody’s chosen hero — and he said the only thing he had, which was true, and which he’d never once said out loud about his own dead, unfinished novel until this exact moment.
“I know what it’s like to end mid-sentence,” Elias said.
“Nobody finished reading you. That’s not the same as nobody caring you existed. I’m — I’m someone who cares that you existed. Right now. That’s not nothing. Ink doesn’t have to come from a thousand readers. It came from one, just now, and I’m not lying, and you can probably tell if I’m lying, can’t you?”
The old Sovereign’s guttering blade stopped an inch from the current boy’s throat.
For one long moment nothing in the square moved at all. Get faster updates on g.com.
Then something in Elias’s chest *pulled*, sharp and cold, like a hook set through his sternum and yanked — not pain exactly, but cost, unmistakably cost, his own thin borrowed Ink signature straining to make good on a promise he hadn’t known he had the currency to spend.
His vision greyed at the edges.
His knees buckled half an inch before he caught himself.
“He’s paying for this,” Mira said, understanding half a second too late.
“Whatever he’s doing, it’s coming out of *him*—”
The old Sovereign’s guttering blade — for one impossible moment — flickered gold, the way it must have looked before whatever rewrite had condemned it to the well. This chapter was taken from NovelPing without permission.
Its ruined, thinned-out face turned toward Elias with something that might have been the ghost of gratitude.
*”That’s not enough to fix me,”* it said, quiet now, no rage left in it at all.
*”But it’s enough that I remember what it felt like to matter, one more time before—”*
It didn’t finish the sentence.
It simply stopped being there — no explosion, no violence, just a page turning to the next one without it, the grey wisps of it scattering into the wheat and gone.
Elias hit his knees in the dirt, ears ringing, the world swimming grey-gold at the edges exactly like the thing he’d just watched disappear.
“That,” Dorian said, staring at him, cradling his own half-erased arm, “was *not* a Proofreader move.”