Lord of the Foresaken

White.

Not blinding light, but an absence that devoured everything else. The world around Lio had no shape, no edge, no sound. Only emptiness stretching infinitely in every direction.

For a heartbeat, he thought he had been erased. That his desperate stand—clinging to his own name against the Narrativeless storm—had failed.

Then the white began to ripple.

Letters drifted past him, black strokes scrawled on invisible parchment. Some curled into shapes he recognized, fragments of words from his childhood. Others warped mid-curve, becoming symbols that no human hand could write.

He reached for one. The instant his fingers touched the ink, it dissolved into smoke. A whisper followed, carried not by air but by memory itself:

You left a page blank.

Lio froze. He knew that voice.

"Shia…?"

The white split open. Out of the fracture stepped a figure—no, a fragment. Shia's outline flickered like torn glass, shards of herself shifting between states. One eye burned with clarity, the other blurred into static. Her body was both here and not, memory and shadow woven into something unstable.

She stared at him, her fractured mouth curling into a warning.

"You left a page blank, Lio. Now something else is writing on it."

Her words struck harder than the Narrativeless storm. He remembered Shia not as she was now, but as she had been—bright, sharp, unyielding. The woman who had once pulled him from despair, whose presence had always forced him forward.

But this was not that Shia. This was what remained of her when memory bled.

"What do you mean?" Lio demanded. The words cracked as if the white void itself resisted them. "What's being written?"

Her fractured form tilted, glitching through movements like broken film. The ink symbols swirling around them bent toward her, forming jagged sentences that collapsed into nothing before he could read them.

"The blank page," Shia whispered. "The space you hesitated to fill. The silence you let linger. They took it. And now they write their story in your place."

The void shook. Behind the words, shadows surged—Narrativeless influence pressing closer. But now it wasn't shapeless. It crawled forward in lines of text, paragraphs etched across the white. Sentences without authors, carving laws into reality itself.

Lio staggered as letters slashed across his skin like blades. Each cut was a sentence forced into him, an unwanted history grafted onto his body.

Shia's fractured hand caught his wrist. Her grip burned cold. "Fight it! If their words become yours, you will not remain yourself. You will be written into them."

Meanwhile, on the edges of the null zone, chaos reigned.

General Morrison barked deployment orders, reality-bomb icons flashing across his command display. His soldiers were already moving toward the pulsing network nodes when the first anomaly struck.

Evacuation transports froze mid-air. Engines still roared, rotors still spun, but the machines hung suspended like toys nailed to the sky.

Then the pilots forgot.

One after another, they unbuckled, stepped out, and walked calmly into nothingness—no fear, no hesitation, their purpose deleted.

Morrison swore as data feeds collapsed into blank lines. "God damn it! They're rewriting even our records!"

Dr. Okafor's voice, faint and trembling, broke in. "It's worse. Every blank they create, they fill. Every soldier erased becomes… narrative fuel. They're turning memory itself into their weapon."

But the council could do nothing but watch as their forces bled away—not in death, but in forgotten silence.

Back in the white, Lio fought to hold onto Shia's fractured presence. Her voice was unstable, but each syllable was a lifeline against the void's hunger.

"How do I stop them?" he asked, forcing the question through the storm of slashing sentences. "How do I take the page back?"

Shia's broken eye focused on him, wide with urgency. "By writing first. By choosing. Every blank is theirs unless you claim it."

The ink slashes thickened, crawling across his arms, his chest, etching alien declarations into him:

Lio never resisted.

Lio accepted the silence.

Lio belonged to the Narrativeless.

He roared, forcing his hands against the crawling letters, but they burned deeper with every struggle. His name—his anchor—flickered dangerously.

Shia's fractured form pressed closer. "Do not fight their words. Write your own!"

The white around them trembled. A fissure split the void, spilling glimpses of collapsing Geneva, of Breach Team Seven's vanishing patrols, of Lyralei's shredded light. The Narrativeless loomed behind it all, vast and patient.

Lio's breath tore through his throat. He slammed a fist into his chest, where the words were deepest, and spoke with all the defiance he had left.

"I am Lio. I choose to fight."

The letters seared, shrieked, and burst into flame. For the first time, his own words carved across the void—fiery strokes burning through the blank page.

The white howled. The ground beneath him fractured into battlefield terrain—shattered streets, broken towers, bleeding skies. The void twisted itself into a war-scape, reshaping according to his declaration.

But the Narrativeless adapted.

From the smoke of his burning words, shapes rose—mockeries of himself, duplicates written wrong. Each wore his face, each bore his voice, but their eyes were hollow script.

Shia staggered, her form tearing under the strain. "They are counter-drafts! Their story against yours. If you fall, theirs becomes canon."

The first doppelgänger lunged. Its movements were jagged, like sentences rearranged mid-action. A clawed hand tore across his shoulder, ripping not flesh but memory—his first kiss, his first victory, erased in an instant.

Lio screamed. His knees buckled.

Shia's fractured body flared, shards of her splintering into light as she threw herself between him and the second duplicate. Her voice shattered into a thousand overlapping tones.

"Keep writing, Lio! Or there will be nothing left to save!"

The battlefield swarmed with his distorted doubles, each carrying fragments of the story he had failed to claim. Each one stronger, heavier, louder.

And through the chaos, the Narrativeless whispered again, calm and certain:

JOIN.

Lio's vision blurred. His strength faltered. Shia's hand slipped from his grasp, her fragments scattering like broken glass.

The last thing he saw before the swarm engulfed him was her fractured eye burning bright, her words seared into him even as her body failed:

"You left a page blank. Don't let them finish writing it."

The duplicates descended. The battlefield screamed.

And then everything shattered.