The horizon wasn't a horizon anymore. It shimmered like torn paper, its edge curled inward, fraying into ellipses. The sky bled sepia ink, sentences dissolving mid-air like forgotten prayers.
The landscape beyond was an unwritten scrawl, flickering with half-rendered metaphors and collapsed tropes. This was the borderland of the Unmother's last edit, where reality stuttered between revisions.
Rafael led the march, the Source-Thread coiled at his side like a sentient question mark etched in cosmic margin notes.
Behind him, the team moved with the weary grace of characters who had outlived their plot armor and now wandered the margins of narrative law.
Arc II had just begun, and none of them knew how many pages were left in this draft, or whether they'd survive its final line.
"Remind me," Oren grunted, dragging a wheeled case of unstable irony across a punctuation faultline, "why we're heading into the rewrite zone? Because my existential insurance doesn't cover recursive edits."
"Because it's where the truth bleeds through," Lira replied, her boots shifting with each unstable footfall as if the ground itself reconsidered being solid. "If we want to find the Unmother's anchor and end this, we need to walk where the world forgets itself. The untold truth lies in the deleted scenes."
They passed what used to be a village—now a heap of metaphors discarded mid-edit. A house stood mid-sentence, its roof frozen as a simile, its walls peppered with deleted adjectives.
Once-memories hovered in broken loops, like quotes waiting for attribution. A fountain spilled commas instead of water, pooling ellipses in the dust. The only sound was the hush of fading prose, whispering what might have been.
"Anyone else feel like we're walking into a draft that never got proofread?" Mira muttered, adjusting her logic visor. Data flitted across the lens in glitched glyphs. "I'm picking up recursive echo fields. Something is looping. Badly."
Bryn knelt, touching the trembling ground. Her glaive flickered with faint runes. "We're being watched," she said softly. "But not by something real."
"Shadow drafts," Juno said, her voice a low hum of acceptance and unease. "Failed versions of us. Echoes that didn't survive the editorial pass. The Unmother leaves them like scarecrows in narrative fields."
"Yo, girl," Oren turned to Juno with his frustration face. "Don't jinx it!"
As if summoned by her words, a ripple passed through the dust. The air shimmered, and from the folds of broken syntax, a mirror-image of Rafael stepped out; eyes hollow, Source-Thread frayed and twitching like an unresolved subplot. It moved with purpose, silent and sure, and swung its blade at him without a word.
Clash.
Fortunately, he manifested a thread-sword in time. The real Rafael caught the blow, gritting his teeth. The force was like arguing with your own regrets—heavy, inevitable. The air fractured with narrative tension, punctuation hanging in suspended doubt.
More shadows emerged. Each a discarded draft of the team. Mira without doubt, Oren without humor, Juno broken by failure, Lira stuck in the canon that betrayed her. They attacked with mechanical grace, each move a reflection of what could have been. Worse, what once almost was.
"No holding back!" Rafael shouted, voice slicing through unrevised space with his thread blade.
The team scattered into formation, blades, logic pulses, and rewritten invectives flying. Every blow was more than combat—it was confrontation.
Bryn roared as she slammed her makeshift shield into a joyless version of herself, cracking through apathy. Mira rewrote a tactical algorithm mid-battle, her visor sparking as uncertainty was rendered into clarity. Numbers danced into poetry.
Juno fought her copy in silence, blade meeting blade in measured rhythm. Each clash spoke volumes of unlived moments. A second of stillness—and then, the real Juno whispered a line of unsaid poetry, a thread of herself never allowed voice. The copy blinked, faltered, and dissolved in a shimmer of missed meaning.
Lira faced herself: a version trapped in frozen duty, too loyal to a dead canon, eyes hollow from unresolved grief. She disarmed it with a fluid motion, then stepped closer, holding its gaze. "I'm more than the footnote they gave me," she said, voice steady and warm with defiance. Her shadow nodded once, almost grateful, before it dispersed like forgotten fanfiction.
Mira's duel turned cerebral. Her shadow was cold, purely logical, a sterile future without error but also without instinct. An intertainer that couldn't entertain the audience. They moved like code in opposition, symmetrical and cruel.
She closed her eyes for a breath, felt the tremble of intuition, and countered with a move that made no sense. Except it did. Her copy hesitated for the first time, blinked… then dissolved, logic overwhelmed by the beauty of contradiction.
Oren, meanwhile, was halfway through a dramatic reading of an ironic poems while wrestling his duplicate to the ground.
"Rhymes poorly with fate—
tragic punchline unresolved—
eat this thesaurus, you jerk!"
His copy paused, as if processing the absurdity, then exploded into a snark bubble with a sound like a rewound sitcom laugh track.
"Thanks," Oren panted, brushing off ash. "Remind me never to monologue during combat again. Unless I'm losing."
The others groaned. Even Mira let out a sharp, surprised giggle. Quickly stifled behind her hand like an overcorrected variable. Bryn ruffled Oren's hair in passing. Juno merely nodded, approval hidden in the faintest quirk of her lips.
Juno stood over the last remnant of her broken self, whispering, "That's why we're seeing them again." She looked up at Rafael. "They're not just echoes. They're sentries. Tests."
Rafael, still catching his breath, nodded slowly. "Left here to keep us from becoming something new."
Mira knelt beside a fading copy of herself, watching its last pixels scatter into the syntax storm. "Or they're warnings. Ghosts of what we could still become if we give up."
Bryn examined her cracked gauntlet, flexing fingers through glitching light. "Whatever they are, they hit like regrets wrapped in plot twists."
Silence settled, thick and meaningful. The kind of silence that only comes after surviving your own worst version.
When it was done, the battlefield was littered with broken self-doubt. Shards of alternate selves glimmered like dead starlight, fading into footnotes no one would read. The dust settled slowly, unsure whether to commit to gravity or dissolve entirely.
Oren flopped down on a pile of word rubble, panting. "If I ever become that serious, someone please drop a semicolon on me."
They laughed. It wasn't long, but it was real. The sound of people who had bled and still found something to joke about. It echoed in the unbuilt air, more powerful than any spell.
A breeze passed over them, heavy with the scent of forgotten endings and aborted plot threads. The sun (or what passed for one) dipped lower, casting long shadows that whispered ellipses and alternate conclusions.
Then, as if drawn from their laughter, something in the air shifted. A doorway appeared ahead, framed in unfinished prose and trembling possibility. Its frame was jagged, grammar folding in on itself at the corners. A threshold.
Lira stepped forward, eyes distant and sharp. "The anchor lies beyond," she said. "And whatever the Unmother is, it doesn't want us to rewrite."
Rafael stepped beside her, spine straightening. The Source-Thread at his side hummed, not with power, but with potential. "Then we make it ours."
One by one, they followed him; Mira, Bryn, Juno, Lira, Oren, stepping through the threshold of the unresolved. Their figures cut against the distortion like declarations waiting to be edited into truth.
The portal shimmered, then folded in behind them, leaving only punctuation in the dust.
***