In a city where ink writes fates, the wrong lift can drag you off the page.
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I could taste the smog before I saw the sunrise—if you could call that jaundiced smear over the smokestacks a rise or the day that followed a life.
In the Waking Realm the sky never moved past charcoal, but it was enough light for business. My business, anyway.
Stall-men were still unknotting their awnings along Scrawl Market, coughing charcoal dust into their sleeves while street sweepers kicked yesterday's ash back into the gutters.
Pickpocketing at dawn felt cruel; no one had coffeeed up yet and I moved like a phantom through the half-set maze of canvas roofs. Loose purses swung low, and I whittled them lighter with two fingers and a thumb.
Strokes clinked in my sleeve—the blessed music of survival.
Strokes [1]look nothing like real money. Slivers of beaten tin, each etched with a single brush-mark that flickers if you squint.
Currency born from some state bureau's fever dream. You can't forge them; the mark changes shape when the metal cools. They spend all the same, though, and by the time I'd crossed three rows of vendors, I'd bled five pockets dry.
Enough for rent. Enough for bread.
Maybe—if the gods of vice were kind—enough for a vice.
The gods obliged.
A rag-vendor on the fringe flashed something rumoured extinct: a real tobacco leaf the colour of old mahogany, pressed flat in wax paper.
He fanned it like contraband silver. "Fresh from the Green Belts," he lied. Nothing grows past the quarantine fences, but lies taste sweeter than truth around here.
"How much?" My voice cracked; actual anticipation still felt foreign on my tongue.
"Six strokes."
I weighed the jingling in my cuff. Six strokes would set me back two days of meals. A dumb trade. I made it anyway. The vendor's grin stretched eel-long as tin changed hands.
I found a shadow beneath a broken neon billboard, tore a ribbon from the leaf, and rolled it in yesterday's newsprint. One match later, smoke stitched its way down my lungs, harsh but fragrant—notes of cedar and the memory of sunlight.
For three breaths, the Waking Realm loosened its grip. I exhaled dreams.
"Spare a spark, street rat?"
The voice belonged to a kid, maybe twelve. Eyes too old for the bone-thin body beneath them. He'd been tailing me a block—rookie mistake.
I flicked the dimming stub over the barrier.
"Earn your own." I didn't say it like a lecture; more like a mirror.
The kid spat at the gutter and vanished into the fog. Might grow into my replacement one day—if he lasts the winter.
I dusted ash from my fingers and got back to work.
Dawn market was done; the real wallets strolled in after the morning sirens: clerks in uniform grey, foremen in patched leather, even an Overseer's courier flaunting a polished chestplate heavy with tassels.
Targets stacked themselves like sermon books.
I chose the courier. Rank buys arrogance. Arrogance buys opportunity. He talked loudly into a lapel mic that almost hid the pouch swinging from his belt—almost.
I drifted sideways, let the crowd's pulse tuck me in behind him, and clipped the pouch's clasp with a nail file while my other hand palmed the body.
Clean.
He never paused his call.
But the pouch drooped oddly in my grip, weight distributed wrong for a coin.
Inside: one crimson stroke and a flat disk the size of a thumbnail, bone-white, devoid of marking except a microscopic groove spiralling inward.
The thing was warm like living skin. Heat bled through my glove.
'Aaaheee- Bloody hell!' I yelled
That made no sense—Overseer couriers haul ritual seeds, not loose coin, which meant I'd just lifted something meant for an altar, not a ledger.[2]
Something in me whispered: put it back.
Instead, I stuffed the pouch down my shirt and slipped into a side alley off Letter Street, pacing casually.
Two corners later, sirens blared—a courier's panic report, no doubt—and casual became sprint. I barreled through drying laundry, vaulted a crumbling stoop, and dove beneath the half-raised shutter of an abandoned printing press—the gutted shell of Ink & Sons Limited.
The place smelled of rust, mold, and a sweeter note I couldn't tag—ozone, maybe.
Silence settled. My heartbeat out-ticked the dusty clock still nailed to the wall. I unwrapped the bone disk.
Up close, the groove wasn't a groove at all; it wriggled, ink-black, alive.
The spiral widened, swallowing surface area, until the entire disk liquefied into a droplet of night suspended above my palm.
Gravity forgot it.
So did reason.
Then it popped—no splash, no stain, just a ring of sound like temple bells underwater. Ink bled from nowhere across the floor, etching concentric circles that pulsed with impossible luminescence.
The circles formed sigils, sigils nested into fractal brush-strokes, brush-strokes folded outward into doors.
"Oh, hells—" was all I managed before the floor quit existing.
Ink swallowed me.
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Falling through ink isn't like water or air.
It's like memory—every sensation layered with déjà vu of sensations you haven't felt yet. The temperature yo-yoed between furnace and frost.
Voices hissed half words. I decided screaming wouldn't help.
Impact came gently as bedsheets. I landed on something solid, black, and faintly glossy—a plateau floating in a starless void.
My clothes were bone-dry.
The smog from home was gone; the 'air' smelled of rain-on-paper. Each breath fizzed on my tongue like static.
Canvas Realm. I knew the rumour: a dimension born of living ink where legends carved their true names; where death here meant death there— no rerolls.
A myth.
A bedtime terror. And now my address.
Lines formed under my boots, white-hot strokes sketching the ground into existence.
Perspective warped until the plateau resembled a massive sheet of calligraphy suspended over an ocean of blank parchment.
Horizon? Ha. The world faded to grayscale edges where ink met nothing.
"You look new."
The voice echoed without a source.
I spun.
A woman perched cross-legged on a jagged pillar ten strides off—mid-twenties, mocha skin banded with silver scars, wearing what looked like tailored ceramic armour layered over street leathers. One pauldron flared like a fountain pen nib.
Her eyes glowed a muted violet—the only colour besides black and white I'd seen since arriving.
"Name?" she asked.
"Don't have one." I jerked a thumb at my chest.
"Wasn't on the birth certificate I never had."
She laughed—a single bark. "Homeless and humourless. You'll fit right in."
A rope of ink slithered down her pillar, hardening into a walkway. She strolled toward me, hands in pockets as though gravity were a polite suggestion.
I fell into a fighting stance without thinking.
She waved the posture away. "Relax, rookie. Aspirant-on-aspirant violence is bad form before the Trials. My Mark's dormant until the bell."
"Aspirant?"
"You'll hear the announcement soon."
Her gaze flicked to the sky—if the blank overhead counted as sky.
"Call me Prism[3]. Rank: Aspirant. Stroke balance: twelve. Attributes classified." She rattled it off like a business card.
"Twelve strokes?" I frowned. "Real ones?"
"Meta-currency," Prism said. "Stroke's what the Realm uses. You'll get the lecture later." She eyed my empty hands. "Looks like you're starting broke. Could be worse."
I didn't answer.
Every survival trick I possessed screamed to map the escape route, but physics here was optional.
The plateau we stood on drifted, I now realised, anchored to nothing but an idea.
Prism took pity. "First time's a shock. Quick primer: Canvas Realm runs on Mark Names—yours will manifest if you survive your First Trial.
Trials are half gladiatorial, half puzzle, all lethal.
Win and the Realm tattoos a little truth into your soul.
Lose and…" She tapped invisible ash from her fingertips. "No respawn."
"So we're conscripted?" I asked. Fear disguised as sarcasm.
"Volunteers, technically. Most people perform the ritual on purpose. You? Wrong pocket?"
"Right pocket, wrong universe." My laugh sounded brittle.
Prism's expression softened, then reset to business.
"Listen closely.
Your best edge is ignorance.
You have no habits to break. Use that. Don't trust your senses—ink lies.
Don't waste real strokes on flashy skills before you grasp recoil. And never look away from a boundary line." She nodded past my shoulder.
I turned.
A boundary line—thin as hair, bright as sunrise—raced across the plateau's edge, sketching a gateway tall as a cathedral arch.
Glyphs orbited its frame, each a foreign character spinning like cogs in a silent clock.
Prism exhaled. "That'll be the bell."
"Bell?"
Chimes erupted from nowhere, sonorous, harmonious, overlapping like a choir inside a hurricane.
The gateway cracked open, pouring silver light that bled colour back into the grayscale void.
My lungs seized—the light tasted of electricity and nostalgia.
Lines engraved themselves along my forearms: jagged calligraphy of a language I didn't recognise, sizzling like fresh branding and vanishing beneath skin.
Not ink on flesh—ink under flesh.
A voice boomed, vast yet intimate, inside the marrow of my skull:
—————◆—————
[ Aspirant! Welcome to the Canvas Realm. Prepare for the First Mark. ]
"Spare me for fuc—"
The light swallowed my vision. And the ground vanished again.
[1] No relation—just bureaucratic naming overlap. If I'm being inconsistent with the money naming, just refer to this: Stroke = Only currency, for now.
[2] Our MC is being framed, really fun.
[3] Prism functions as a diegetic tutorial for the world's rules. You can see her as a random character or as a powerful being that might appear later...