Chapter 5: The Hand That Writes You
> "Not all ink is black.
Some is made of forgetting."
— Unknown entry, no date
---
Tonight,
the stars had no pattern.
They blinked out of rhythm —
like eyes trying to send warnings
in a language no one remembered.
Ranzō stood on a rooftop
that shouldn't exist —
the building beneath it gone,
the edges crumbling into fog.
His coat didn't flutter in the wind.
There was no wind.
Only the pressure —
that unbearable silence
right before something speaks
from behind your back.
---
He looked at his left hand.
There was writing on it.
He hadn't written it.
> "Don't listen when it says your name."
A whisper behind him:
> "Ranzō..."
He didn't turn.
He never turned
when the world pretended to be someone.
Instead,
he took the pen —
sharp as memory,
cold as guilt —
and began writing on the air.
The ink floated like smoke,
shaping words that shimmered briefly
before vanishing:
> "If the world speaks,
make sure it forgets what it said."
---
The ground below trembled —
not like an earthquake,
but like a heartbeat
from something beneath reality.
Then,
a hand reached out from the fog —
long, thin fingers
stitched together with thread made of light.
It didn't touch him.
It pointed.
To a door.
---
A door in the sky.
Floating. Waiting.
He walked toward it,
the rooftop cracking under his feet,
gravity folding in on itself.
As he reached for the handleless door,
he realized:
> It wasn't a door at all.
It was a page.
A blank one.
And it had his name already written on the bottom.
---
> Some things we write.
Others… write us back.