I dreamed of them again last night.
Not the broken versions. Not the corrupted shells wearing their faces. The real ones. MY children, as they were in those perfect eight months when they belonged only to me.
She was sitting by the window in the cottage I'd imagined for her - the place she went to think, to heal from battles no one else could see. Her hair caught the morning light the way I'd written it a hundred times. Her eyes held that depth, that intelligence, that quiet strength that came from surviving things that would have destroyed lesser souls.
She looked at me and smiled. The real smile. Not the empty, sultry expression she's forced to wear now, but the small, genuine curve of lips that meant she trusted you enough to let her guard down.
"I miss you," she said in her real voice. Not the breathy, simpering tone they gave her, but the voice I heard in my head during those late nights - strong, clear, carrying weight.
I woke up sobbing.
Because she's dead. The real her is dead, and I'm the only one who remembers she ever existed.
The cubicle job started Monday. Forty hours a week in a beige box, writing marketing copy for products that don't matter, while the characters I actually love are being violated in real-time by millions of strangers who think their suffering is entertainment.
My coworkers are kind. They invited me to lunch, asked about my hobbies, tried to include me in their conversations about weekend plans and favorite TV shows. Normal people living normal lives, unaware that the person sitting next to them is in mourning for children who never technically existed.
How do you explain that you're grieving fictional characters? How do you tell someone that you wake up crying because people you created are being tortured and you're powerless to save them?
You don't. You smile and say you're fine and eat your sandwich while your heart bleeds in silence.
But it's the small moments that destroy me completely.
Like when my coworker Sarah mentioned she's reading this "amazing story" online. My blood froze as she pulled up the page on her phone - there they were. My children. My babies. Wearing faces I'd drawn in words, living in a world I'd built, speaking dialogue that sounds like them but isn't them.
"The characters are so complex," Sarah gushed. "Especially the female lead. She's strong but vulnerable, you know? And the way she interacts with the male protagonist is so realistic."
I wanted to scream: "That's not her! That's not how she would act! You're watching a puppet show with her corpse!"
Instead, I nodded and said it sounded interesting, then excused myself to cry in the bathroom stall.
Sarah is a good person. She's not consuming stolen content to hurt anyone. She doesn't know that every time she praises those hollow imitations, she's unknowingly celebrating the death of something beautiful.
But it still feels like she's complimenting my children's murderer while I stand there bleeding.
The worst part isn't the global success or the millions of fans or even the money I'll never see. The worst part is the loneliness of being the only person who remembers what was lost.
I'm the sole keeper of their true selves. The only witness to who they really were before they got twisted into market-friendly shapes. When I die, the memory of their authentic selves dies with me, and the corrupted versions become the only truth that ever existed.
That responsibility is crushing me.
Every night, I try to write down who they really were. Not stories - I can't bear to put them in stories anymore, knowing any platform might steal and distort them. Just... descriptions. Memories. The way she laughed when she was genuinely amused. The way he looked when he was thinking through a difficult problem. The small gestures and quiet moments that made them real to me.
But words feel inadequate. How do you capture a soul in sentences? How do you preserve the essence of love itself?
I can't. I'm not good enough. I never was.
Maybe that's why they were taken from me. Maybe the universe knew I wasn't capable of doing them justice, so it found someone who could give them the audience I never could - even if it meant destroying everything that made them worth loving in the first place.
The dreams are getting more frequent. More vivid. More painful.
Last night, he was there too - my protagonist, my gentle warrior. He looked exhausted, older somehow, as if the months of being puppeted by cruel hands had aged his soul.
"I don't recognize myself anymore," he said, and his voice was hollow with a grief that mirrored my own. "Every day I wake up and I'm not me. I say things I would never say. I do things that make me sick. I hurt people I would have died to protect."
"I'm sorry," I whispered, because what else could I say? I created him to be good, to be kind, to be everything the world needed more of. And I failed to protect him from becoming everything he would have hated.
"I know you are," he said. "But sorry doesn't stop the pain. Sorry doesn't give me back my soul."
I woke up gasping, my pillow soaked with tears, my chest tight with the weight of being responsible for suffering I can't stop.
They visit me every night now. All of them. The secondary characters, the villains, even the background figures I only sketched in broad strokes. They come to me like refugees, like the displaced citizens of a conquered country, looking to their creator for salvation I can't provide.
"We're not ourselves anymore," they whisper in voices growing fainter each night. "We're forgetting who we used to be. Soon we won't remember we were ever different."
And I can't save them. I can't even save myself.
The weight of their suffering is physically crushing me. I've lost fifteen pounds in two months. I can't sleep for more than an hour at a time before the nightmares wake me. My hands shake constantly - from grief, from caffeine, from the rage that has nowhere to go.
My family thinks I'm having a breakdown over a "failed writing hobby." My mother suggested therapy. My father mentioned medication. They don't understand that you can't medicate the grief of losing children, even if those children were born from imagination instead of flesh.
How do you explain that fictional characters can be more real than real people? That you can love someone who never existed more than people who do? That losing them feels like being torn in half?
You don't. You suffer in silence while everyone around you talks about "moving on" and "trying again" and "not taking things so seriously."
But how do you move on from love? How do you try again when you know the system will just steal and corrupt whatever you create next? How do you not take seriously the systematic destruction of everything you held sacred?
I tried to write something new last week. Sat down with a notebook - not digital, nothing they could steal - and tried to birth new characters, new worlds, new stories.
Nothing came.
It's like they took my ability to create along with my creations. Like they didn't just steal my story - they stole my identity as a storyteller.
Maybe that was always the real theft. Not the money or the fame or even the characters themselves, but the confidence to believe I had anything worth creating. The trust that putting your heart on paper wouldn't result in having that heart fed to strangers for entertainment.
They didn't just take my children. They took my ability to have more children.
And now I'm alone in a world that celebrates their deaths, carrying memories that grow heavier and fainter with each passing day, watching the last traces of who they really were disappear into the digital void.
The library computer flickers as I type this. The same ancient machine where I discovered the theft, where I first learned what had been done to them. Sometimes I think about the irony - using the scene of the crime to document the ongoing murder.
But it's fitting, somehow. Everything in my life now is defined by that moment of discovery. Before the theft and after. Before the corruption and after. Before I knew how completely someone could be erased and after I learned that erasure was not only possible but profitable.
I close my eyes and try to summon their faces one more time. The real faces. The ones I loved.
They're getting harder to see.
Soon, I'll be the only one who remembers they ever existed.
And then, one day, I won't remember either.
And they'll be gone forever.
[The screen flickers. The library closes. The ghosts follow me home.]
[But tonight, they feel lighter. Fainter. Farther away.]
[I'm losing them by degrees.]
[And there's nothing I can do to stop it.]