Weight

Recap:

Dick was left gasping in the dirt, realizing that in a world without an audience, his 'velocity' was nothing more than noise. Thrall walked away, leaving the broken thing behind, not realizing he had just encountered a parasite that would soon consume his entire tribe.

Act I: Rejection

The forest did not care about the 'Smooth-Thing,' and neither did Thrall. After dropping the vibrant-skinned noise in the mud, Thrall simply turned away. The hunt was a jealous master; it demanded a mind stripped of distractions.

He spent the next several hours in a slow, rhythmic pursuit. The sun moved across the sky with a heavy, honest pace that mirrored Thrall’s own. He tracked a stag through the dense undergrowth, his breath steady, his movements a part of the wind. When the kill finally came, it was quiet and certain—like the weight of his spear.

By the time Thrall returned to the cave, the sky had bruised into a deep purple. He carried the stag across his shoulders, its warmth a familiar, grounding pressure against his spine.

But as he approached the entrance, the silence he expected was gone.

A rhythmic, slapping sound echoed against the stone walls, punctuated by high, sharp bursts of the Smooth-Thing’s voice. Thrall stepped into the light of the fire and stopped.

Dick was there, standing in the center of the communal space. He was moving in frantic, repetitive jerks—dropping to the ground, pushing up, and leaping into the air. His skin was slick with a thin, greasy sweat, and his white teeth flashed in the firelight.

The tribe was gathered in a semi-circle, their usual tasks abandoned. The women weren't scraping hides; the men weren't knapping flint. They sat with their mouths slightly open, watching the 'velocity' of the intruder with a vacant, hypnotic intensity.

Thrall felt a sharp prickle of annoyance—a low, buzzing heat behind his eyes. To him, the Smooth-Thing was a blemish, a waste of calories that signaled nothing but danger. He dropped the stag with a heavy thud that should have commanded the room.

No one looked up.

The Patriarch sat nearby, his eyes tracking Dick's movements with a look of tired curiosity. Thrall moved to the back of the cave, his jaw tight. He kept to himself, butchering the stag with aggressive, precise strokes of his hand-axe. Every time the Smooth-Thing let out a triumphant shout or a clap, Thrall’s grip on the stone tightened.

He was home, but for the first time, he felt like a guest who had stayed too long.

Act II: Drift

The back of the cave had always been Thrall’s sanctuary, a place where the history of the hunt was etched into the very bones of the earth. He took a piece of charred wood, the carbon staining his calloused fingers, and began to work.

He drew the bison. It was a manual of survival: the curve of the hump, the vulnerable pocket behind the shoulder, the specific angle of the spear’s entry. Each stroke was a heavy, honest record of how to stay alive.

But when he returned the next day, the gravity of the wall had been vandalized.

A group of younger males—men who should have been out scouting the migration—were huddled by his drawings. They weren't studying the kill-points. They were using wet clay and crushed berries to 'update' the stone. They had smeared over the bison's vitals, replacing the map of the hunt with a crude, vibrant depiction of the Smooth-Thing.

They had painted Dick’s puffed-up chest, his jagged beard, and the strange, triangular shape of his 'optimized' torso. They had even tried to replicate the 'Electric Cobalt' of his shirt with blue mud. To Thrall, it was a desecration. They had turned a manual for survival into a mural of performance.

Thrall’s chest tightened. He looked at the boys, but they didn't flinch. They didn't even look at him. They were too busy admiring the 'moment' they had captured on the wall.

The drift became a chasm during the next meal.

Thrall sat by his kill, his legs crossed, the stag’s haunch before him. It was the prize of his labor, the currency of a hunter. When the Smooth-Thing approached, his hand reaching out with a casual, unearned entitlement, Thrall didn't hesitate.

He didn't snarl. He simply moved. His hand, thick and scarred, clamped around Dick’s wrist like a vise, pinning the soft limb to the dirt.

The silence that followed was absolute.

Thrall expected the tribe to roar in approval, to see the intruder’s hand stayed by the provider. Instead, he felt the weight of their judgment. The tribe turned as a single organism—a hive mind of confused dissent. They didn't see a hunter protecting his kill; they saw a disruption of the 'vibe.'

The Patriarch looked away, his silence a heavy, disappointing blanket.

They began to move, their bodies shifting away from Thrall in a slow, synchronized retreat. They didn't fight him; they simply withdrew their attention. They formed a new circle ten paces away, huddled around the Smooth-Thing, sharing the meager scraps of gathered roots and berries, leaving Thrall alone with his mountain of meat.

He took a bite of the stag. It was rich and warm, but as he watched the tribe mimic the Smooth-Thing’s hand gestures in the distance, the food felt like ash in his mouth. He was the only one eating, yet he was the only one who felt the hunger of being forgotten.

Act III: Weight of the Spear

The cave had become a theater of ghosts. Thrall stood in the shadows of the rear gallery, watching the tribe's final surrender.

He looked at the walls one last time. His drawings of the bison—the maps of bone and blood—were almost entirely obscured by the chaotic, colorful smears of the 'New Way.' The youth were no longer honing their senses and skill. They stood with their chests out and stomachs in, glancing at each other with a desperate, hollow need for approval that the earth would never give them.

Thrall realized then that he wasn't just losing his family; he was watching the decline of the human animal. The "Smooth-Thing" had brought a luxury more lethal than a drought: the belief that looking like a hunter was the same as being one.

He looked at the spears leaning against the cave wall. They were dusty. The flint tips were chipped and unsharpened. The younger men didn't reach for them anymore.

Thrall walked to the rack and picked up his own spear.

It felt immense, yet it was the weight of the truth.

He didn't make a speech. He didn't look for a 'moment' to capture. He simply turned toward the mouth of the cave.

As he crossed the threshold, he felt the air change. Outside, the world was still vast, cold, and brutally honest. It was a place where 'velocity' meant the speed of a predator's strike, not the rhythm of a clap.

He stepped into the tall grass, his feet finding the familiar, uneven texture of the real world. He did not look back at the entrance. He didn't need to. He could already feel the distance growing.

He was a hunter walking into a world that was becoming a wilderness again, carrying the only thing left that had any gravity.

Epilogue:

At the edge of the treeline, where the shadows of the forest loomed taller than the hills, Thrall stopped. He couldn't help himself. He turned his head just enough to steal one last peek at the cave's mouth.

In the distance, the campfire was a flickering, neglected orange eye. It was dying. No one was gathering wood. No one was watching the perimeter. They were all sat passively around the glow, their bodies huddled close to the 'Smooth-Thing.'

Thrall looked at his spear, then back at the fading light. A question tugged at his mind, heavy and sharp: What else could he have done?

He had shown them the meat. He had shown them the mud. He had shown them the maps. But you cannot feed someone who has forgotten how to swallow, and you cannot lead someone who has chosen to be an audience.

The first howl of a wolf echoed from the ridge—a real sound, a heavy sound. The tribe didn't react. They didn't reach for their weapons. They just shifted closer to the dying fire, looking for a 'moment' to save them from the dark.

Thrall turned his back for the final time. He adjusted the weight of the spear on his shoulder and walked into the silence of the trees.

The future was getting loud, but Thrall was finally back in the quiet. 

Pivot

 

Recap:

Dick Primale was a creature of high-definition. In his world, life was balanced between a ring light and a lens. He was 'optimized'—a collection of dry muscle, expensive grooming products, and a wardrobe of synthetic fibers designed to wick sweat he rarely allowed himself to break.

Then, the anomaly in the university lab—that silent, heavy rift of absolute zero-acceleration—swallowed his momentum whole. The world of fiber-optics and macro-balanced meal plans vanished. The 'modern man' didn't just travel through time; he fell out of the race entirely, landing in the silent, crushing weight of the Pleistocene.

Act I: The Smooth Thing in the Mud

The transition was a sensory assault. The smell of the Pleistocene hit him like a physical blow: the heavy, cloying scent of damp earth, raw musk, and ancient cedar.

When the Neanderthal group found him, Dick was a neon wound against the grey-green landscape. His compression shirt, a shade of 'Electric Cobalt' that didn't exist in nature, clung to his torso like a second, strangling skin. Compared to the group, Dick looked unfinished. He was unnervingly hairless, his skin a pale, exfoliated pink that seemed thin enough to tear under the weight of the wind.

He stood before the Patriarch—a man who was less a human and more a mountain given breath. The Patriarch’s skin was a landscape of leather and scar tissue, his brow a heavy shelf of bone that cast his eyes into permanent, watchful shadow.

Dick didn't have his phone to shield him, so he used the only tool he had left: The Pitch. He slid into a combat stance, his white veneers flashing in a desperate, predatory grin. He began to shadow-box, his limbs moving with a frantic, twitchy speed—the 'velocity' he had spent a lifetime perfecting. He pointed to his chest, then to the horizon, his voice a high-pitched stream of marketing jargon and 'alpha' affirmations that echoed uselessly against the silent trees.

Act II: The Living Curio

The Patriarch did not see a threat. He did not even see a man. He saw a novelty.

To a people who lived by the brutal math of calorie-in-versus-calorie-out, Dick was a fascinating waste of resources. He was a 'Fancy Thing.' His muscles were shaped for show, not for the lunging kill or the mile-long carry. His voice was a rhythmic, colorful noise that lacked the deep, resonant warning of a predator or the sharp clarity of a bird.

They kept him because his uselessness was a luxury. To feed the 'Smooth-Thing' was a display of immense tribal wealth. It was a flex of the Patriarch’s power—that he was such a provider, he could afford to keep a mouth fed that contributed nothing but noise. He would sit by the fire and watch Dick’s 'routines' with the same vacant, entertained expression one might give a captive gecko in a jar.

Dick started his burpees—a name that, ironically, sounds more like a post-meal infant ritual than a grueling exercise. The children would giggle and poke at his synthetic leggings, mesmerized by the way the fabric snapped back against his hairless calves. He was their enrichment—a flickering, moving ornament that filled the long, terrifying silences of the winter.

Act III: The Pivot to the Idiotic

Two Years Later.

The cave had lost its gravity. The air, once thick with the focused silence of survival, was now cluttered with the sound of mimicry.

A group of younger males stood nearby, mimicking Dick’s stance. They weren't practicing the low, wide base needed to brace against a charging bison; they were practicing 'angles.' They stood with their chests out and stomachs in, glancing at each other to see who looked the most like the hairless toy.

The hunt had been forgotten. The meat was low, the fire was dying, but nobody moved to fix it. They were locked in anticipation. They were waiting for Dick to stand up and provide the next 'moment.'

The Patriarch looked at Dick—now a degraded asset, his cobalt shirt reduced to blue threads hanging from his waist—and felt a terrifying, wordless realization. The Smooth-Thing had brought a sickness more deadly than any winter.

They were no longer hunters. They were an audience.

And as the Patriarch felt his own hand twitch, trying to replicate a 'thumbs-up' gesture he didn't truly understand, he realized they had become slaves to the noise. The future had arrived early, and was about to get very, very loud.

Epilogue

They had fed him. Bathed him. Protected him from the cold, with furs better suited for a child. In lean seasons, they had given him food first, as one might nurse a presence whose utility had failed, yet whose absence lingered like a void.

No one remembered why.

The hunt had been forgotten. The tools dulled. The young learned the gestures before they learned the weight of a spear.

Generations later, when the tribe thinned and scattered—the marks they left behind puzzled those who came after.

Figures without purpose. Bodies posed to be seen.

Evidence of attention, preserved without understanding.

They had not been conquered.

They had adored the thing that replaced them.

Velocity

Prologue: Absolute Velocity

Dick Primale learned who he was supposed to be from his phone.

It happened algorithmically. A reel here, a caption there. Inspirational before-and-after photos and podcasts promising new truths.

By twenty-nine, Dick had perfected the look. Lean, dry, always angled toward good light. A beard trimmed within an inch of its life. Tattoos that suggested something older and harder than his actual past.

He’d dropped out of business school, bored and quietly relieved. Classes had felt like stalling. Sitting. Waiting. Online, everything moved faster. Online, he could already be ahead.

He told his followers he trained every day. His meals arrived in recyclable containers—“clean,” “macro-balanced,” sponsored. He preached discipline while silencing delivery notifications.

Dick believed, sincerely, that humanity had evolved past weakness—and that he was the evidence.

So when the invitation arrived—sealed, official, flattering—it carried the logo of his old university. They weren't calling him back for his business acumen; they were calling him back for his reach. His alma mater needed a relevant voice, a "modern man" to bridge the gap between their enduring research and the culture of velocity. Dick didn't hesitate.

Chapter One: Legacy Energy

The research facility sat on the edge of a historic campus, glass and steel threaded through stone and bricks.

Walking through the quad now, the memory hit him—not of classes, but of dominance. The sun caught the same ivy-covered stones. The scent of cut grass and old library paper was the same.

He saw a trio of students huddled near a fountain, earnest and too skinny. They weren't looking at glowing screens; they were clutching thick, spine-cracked books.

A low, fond smile stretched his lips. He remembered the weight of a backpack slamming into a nerd's back, the startled oomph as they went sprawling. He remembered the satisfying splash as another hapless victim, walking too close to his path, ended up with his head under the cold spray of a water fountain.

Obsolete, he thought, staring at the books. Unoptimized.

"I wonder what those book nerds are up to now," he muttered to himself. He realized he’d been practicing the philosophy of velocity long before the caption existed. This place was where he had learned to move faster than the weak.

Dick pulled out his phone, shaking off the memory like water. Time to perform. He began his livestream, walking backward through the atrium, chest out, camera tilted just right.

“Crazy we still fund places like this,” he told the camera. “All this legacy energy.”

He spun on his heel, pointing the phone past the classical facade of the main building toward the shimmering glass structure rising nearby. “But now, we cut the old stone. Gotta keep moving. This way to the good stuff.”

The researchers tolerated him politely. They spoke about frequencies, stability, controlled observation. Dick nodded, half-listening, glancing at his reflection in polished surfaces. He interrupted when he could.

“Right, but isn’t stagnation the real danger?” he asked at one point. “Like—evolution favors velocity.”

No one answered that.

Chapter Two: The Absolute Boundary

The Lead Researcher, Dr. Stanley Grant, finally ushered him into the inner sanctum. Dick expected banks of supercomputers or flashing lights. Instead, the area was shielded by lead-lined walls and felt eerily muted, as if the air itself was heavier here.

"This is why the university reached out to you, Mr. Primale," Dr. Grant said, his voice low and sharp, "Not for your technical opinions, but for your ability to influence the narrative. We need this project to sound like progress."

He gestured to a discreet, hand-drawn sign tacked to a containment panel: Zero Disclosure Protocol.

"The distortion," he continued, "is inherently volatile. It defies all known laws of motion, time, and space. The moment the public knows about a localized point of absolute zero-acceleration, they'll demand an application—a source of infinite energy, transport, or maybe even a weapon. We simply can't give them that, not until we fully grasp its stability."

At the center of the lab was the device, a complex framework of brass and dark ceramic housing the anomaly. The rift itself was not dramatic. It was a shapeless blur of nothingness, contained within a softly humming field of blue light.

It had no color, no depth, and offered no reflection. It was a localized distortion, barely visible, like heat over asphalt seen in an airless room.

Dr. Grant spoke with hushed respect. "It's a point of zero-acceleration. An absolute boundary. We've been researching on this distortion and its containment for over twenty years. Full understanding still eludes our technological progress."

Dick found it boring. It looked slow.

"So it's just... old?" he asked, scoffing. "That's the big discovery? No offense, but that's not exactly 'Progress.' This is an R&D facility, right? What's the application? The next-gen energy source? The shortcut?"

Dr. Grant didn't look up from his readings. He warned him not to approach too closely. Something about gravimetric interference. About delicate equilibrium.

Dick waved it off.

“My watch regulates my stress cycles,” he said, lifting his wrist. “I’m optimized. I'm fast.”

He stepped closer anyway, angling for a shot. He needed the blur in the background, a subtle, almost-imperceptible texture of danger behind his triumphant pose.

As he lifted his arm, the complex electronics in his wrist—the multiple apps, the constant background data flowing from his phone and watch, the sheer noise of his personal velocity—overwhelmed the delicate containment field.

The distortion shuddered. The humming blue light flickered once, going dead black.

Someone shouted: "Mr. Primale! Step back! The frequency is collapsing!"

Dick felt a sudden pressure, like gravity misfiring. It wasn't a sudden stop; it was the opposite. The rift didn't pull him in; it accelerated everything around him. He felt the sheer velocity of the laboratory—the atoms, the air, the flow of time—all rushing past his fixed point.

His livestream cut mid-sentence. The phone dropped, striking the ground in a soundless instant. The world around him became an invisible, soundless smear. The floor, the walls, the ceiling—all of it vanished, Dick Primale, the man who believed in absolute velocity, realized he had just been outrun.

Chapter Three: Primal Reckoning

Dick tumbled out of the world and into cold mud. No gym flooring, no filtered air—just raw earth, dense forest, and a canopy that swallowed the sky—everything heavy, unhurried, indifferent.

His phone was gone. His watch blinked red, dying. He pushed himself up, legs shaking.

Then he saw the Neanderthal.

Thrall was stocky, dense, mid-hunt—spear loose in one hand, crouched over tracks in the soft earth. He hadn’t noticed the intrusion yet. He looked like he belonged here, the way stone belongs.

Dick’s hand twitched for a camera that wasn’t there.

He stepped forward, snapping a twig. Thrall’s head lifted slowly, dark eyes settling on him with mild curiosity. No alarm. Just acknowledgment.

That calm felt like disrespect.

Dick rolled his shoulders, leaning hard into his expertise: fifty thousand hours of MMA reels in 4K, plus the 2.5 comments he averaged on every video he watched. Enough to know how this ended.

He slid into a stance—knees bent, hands loose, weight forward—then shifted again, bouncing because stillness made him nervous.

Across from him, Thrall simply stood.

Low. Wide. Quiet.

“Let’s go, extinct boy,” Dick muttered. “Sapiens rule.”

He dropped levels and shot.

Arms reaching for the legs, head tucked, driving forward with everything he had. He expected movement. A sprawl. A scramble. Something to work with.

Instead, his forearms wrapped around pillars.

Thrall didn’t step back. Didn’t widen his base. Didn’t react.

Dick pushed harder, legs churning uselessly beneath him, calves burning, feet sliding. It was like trying to uproot a Doric column. The strength went nowhere and came back into him, folding him inward.

Panic flickered. He disengaged fast, stumbled back, heart pounding.

“Okay,” he said aloud, to himself. “Okay.”

He swung.

A clean right hand, practiced in mirrors and shadows. Knuckles cracked against Thrall’s cheekbone. There was a sound—dull, meaty—but no drama. Thrall’s head shifted an inch. Maybe two.

No stumble. No flare of anger. Just a blink, slow and assessing.

Thrall had been hit harder by siblings fighting over bone marrow. By elbows in cramped caves. By accidental headbutts in the dark. Pain registered, cataloged, dismissed.

Dick mistook the lack of reaction for dominance.

He stepped in again—and that’s when Thrall grabbed him.

The arms closed around Dick’s torso with frightening calm, forearm across his ribs, bicep crushing his side. The grip wasn’t tight at first. It didn’t need to be. It was certain.

Dick’s breath left him in a sharp, involuntary sound.

His feet lifted off the ground.

The world tilted, spun. His brain scrambled for techniques—elbows, knees, something—but there was no space. No leverage. His body had never been held like this. Never without rules. Never without an audience to stop it.

Thrall adjusted his grip the way you adjust a sack that’s slipping.

Then he threw him.

Dick hit the ground hard, mud filling his mouth, roots biting into his side. Before he could orient himself, he was airborne again—into a tree this time, bark scraping skin, air tearing out of him in a dry wheeze.

He tried to scramble up, hands slipping, legs useless. The ground wasn’t flat. It didn’t care. It pulled at him, twisted him, refused to help.

Desperation kicked in.

As Thrall closed again, Dick leapt—not forward, but up, arms snaking around the thick neck he could barely encircle. He locked his hands, squeezing with everything he had, trying to sink into a rear choke he’d watched a thousand times.

Nothing happened.

The neck beneath his forearm was dense—corded, immovable. Like trying to choke black ironwood. No give. No compression. Thrall’s breathing didn’t change.

One thick hand reached up, found Dick’s wrist, and peeled it away with slow, humiliating ease.

Then Thrall shrugged.

Dick slid off him and hit the ground again, this time harder. His vision blossomed with spots. His lungs burned. He slapped at Thrall’s arm, frantic, fast.

“Tap—tap—tap—okay—okay! Mercy, bro—!”

Thrall froze.

He looked down at the thing on the ground—soft, loud, moving wrong. It wasn’t fleeing. It wasn’t fighting. It wasn’t dying.

It was… asking?

Thrall tilted his head slightly, confused. The creature smelled strange. Wrong. Sour-sweet. Chemical. Its body was padded where it shouldn’t be, fragile where it mattered.

Not food. Not threat.

Just… noise.

After a moment, Thrall stepped back.

Lost interest.

Dick lay there gasping, face in the mud, shaking—not victorious, not enlightened, not even defeated in a way he could frame. His two past fighting experiences—shoving a nerd into a fountain and elbowing a stranger out of the way of a perfect angle at Coachella—felt like irrelevant, pathetic gestures.

Just ignored.

And that, more than the blows, broke him.

Epilogue: The Sound of Relevance.

Dick woke to the sound of birds chirping.

Not the modern tunes on reels—no layered audio, no upbeat rhythm. Just scattered calls echoing through trees that didn’t care if he noticed.

His body hurt in unfamiliar ways. Not sharp. Not cinematic. Just heavy. Slow.

He sat up. Mud caked his clothes. A bruise darkened along his ribs.

The forest moved at its own pace. Light shifted. Leaves fell. Somewhere nearby, something cracked bone and fed.

Dick stood, then stopped. There was no direction to move fast toward. No signal. No audience. No way to measure anything.

Nothing around him reacted to his presence. 

The Tower

Prologue:

High atop the church’s bell tower, amid the frosted ruins of a small, abandoned village, a solitary figure stood motionless—keeping vigil over the frozen grave below.

He had chosen to remain among these ruins.

They were the last testament to his will—a fitting throne for his ambition, a wreckage exalted into a monument to the truth he had always known would come.

Fresh footsteps began to materialize across the sacred snow.

“Right on time,” the tower keeper mused.

He did not flinch. He already knew every step this intruder would take, and exactly where those steps would end.

He released a muted sigh.

Once, his breath had risen warm and defiant against the void.

Now it vanished the instant it left his lips—indistinguishable from the vast, icy atmosphere that had enveloped this world.

Act One:

The Annotator stood in the heart of the desolation.

This world was forbidden to him.

He was meant to be alone; yet the air itself felt occupied—thick, patient, unyielding.

The sensation was not entirely foreign.

Something here recognized him.

The recognition was mutual, and unwanted.

The bell tower compelled him, dragging his gaze upward.

He decided to confront it with the same courage that had dragged him across the threshold of this world now tightened around his ribs.

No hesitation.

No retreat.

He started toward the church, each stride deliberate, boots punching through the crusted snow with the crisp, confident sound of a man who still believed he could choose his ending. The tower loomed taller with every step, its silhouette sharpening against the white sky as though carving itself free from the horizon.

The church’s dark entrance waited—a gaping mouth framed by splintered doors hanging from frozen hinges.

This was the moment when his confidence slipped into caution.

He began his ascent.

Each step upward was a betrayal.

His heart hammered against the cage of his ribs, frantic, pleading for him to stop—every beat trying to drag him back.

His lungs burned with ice.

His legs trembled.

Yet his feet kept climbing—stubborn.

Halfway up, the spiral narrowed; the walls brushed his shoulders like a throat closing. The light behind him thinned to nothing. Still the promise at the top compelled him, carrying him one exhausted, inevitable step after another.

Act Two:

The final step released him into stillness. For the first time since the climb began, the crushing weight on his chest evaporated, as though the tower itself had been holding its breath for him.

The door ahead drew itself open without a sound—not offering passage so much as inviting it, as if his arrival were not only expected but overdue.

The room beyond was dim and dust‑laden, yet every surface throbbed with activity arrested in place—loose yellowed pages occupying every inch they could claim, as if the work here had never paused, only multiplied.

At the far end of the room, framed by the tower’s lone window and the pale world beyond it, sat the Inscriber before a deteriorating coffee table, his back to the doorway like a statue that had endured countless seasons.

Act Three:

With the faintest nudge of his boot, the Inscriber sent the chair sliding backward. The room had waited through winters and thaws, every surface and shadow aligned for this moment.

The silence pressed in—absolute and unmoving—making the Annotator’s own heartbeat sound intrusive, a foreign rhythm in a room that had known only anticipation.

Neither spoke. The quiet stretched taut between them until the Annotator’s gaze drifted to the scattered sheets that carpeted the floor. He bent and picked up a page, eyes scanning the ink, and immediately felt the unsettling precision of every stroke—as if the hand that made it had measured not only the letters but the weight of his arrival.

One page after another, he lifted them. Each was identical to the last—same words, same ink, same pressure, same hand.

He muttered, barely audible, “Why—”

The Inscriber’s voice cut through the stillness—calm and absolute.

“Because this world had to endure.”

His voice fell over the room like a shadow settling into every corner—not harsh, not gentle, simply final.

“You can layer your fragile comforts over cold, unyielding truths—wrap yourself in blankets of lies—but the cold pierces through, always. You climbed the stairs, each step a rebellion against exhaustion, each heartbeat a plea for pause. Yet you reached the top.

“You believed you would confront me, alter what has been written, bend this world to your will—but that was never the design. I am the hand that preserves the order you resist. I am you, and you are me, yet we remain opposed, locked in a cycle older than memory, beyond reason.

“Come. Sit. Before you rests the page of our story, carved in the patience of ages. The final line awaits your hand—as the tower long ago foresaw it would.”

Epilogue:

Outside, the world remained indifferent, frozen in its quiet endurance.

Inside, the Annotator and the Inscriber faced one another—separated by inevitability, bound by identity, locked in a pattern older than time itself.

The story hung at the tip of a pen.

 

White as Snow: The Author's Retcon

 

The Author walked into the town long after the last chimney had gone cold.  

Snow had erased every footprint but his own. The houses stood open like broken music boxes—lids shattered, songs long muted. He moved slowly, boots punching through the icy crust, something heavy beneath his ribs. The silence here was not peaceful; it was the silence of a scream frozen mid-air.

He found the townspeople on the far ridge, huddled around a fire that barely glowed. Their faces were thin, their eyes older than the winter itself.

“You’re too late,” the baker said without greeting. “He’s past listening. He always was.”

“He’s a child,” the Author answered.

“He stopped being a child the day he decided the world had to die to keep one snowflake perfect.”

The Author looked back at the white sea that had swallowed the valley. The cold bit through his coat, through skin, straight into the soul where stories are forged. He heard his own newer sentences echoing inside his head—the gentler ones, the careful ones, the kind that apologized for existing. 2025 sentences. Sentences that asked permission. Sentences that ended with question marks even when they wanted to end with periods.

Had he gone soft?

He turned his back on the fire and started walking.

The journey inward took longer than geography should allow. The wind carved his cheeks raw. Each step was a small betrayal of the cold he had once praised on the page. He recited fragments to himself as he went, testing their weight:

“…cannot survive the warmth of the living…”  

“…the functional order was a lie…”  

“…the final, cold embrace…”

They sounded thinner out here, like fluttering paper in a blizzard.

He found the boy at the center of everything, half-buried in the drift he had been defending. The child’s face was white as snow, lips faintly blue, eyelashes starred with frost. Perfect. Untouched.

The Author dropped to his knees.

He reached in, gripped the stiff shoulders, and pulled. The body came free with a soft, reluctant sigh, as though the snow truly hated to let go. He hauled the boy clear, laid him on the crust of ice, and—without ceremony—slapped him hard upside the head. The crack echoed like breaking ice.

“This,” the Author said, voice raw, “is what happens when people are afraid to tell you no.”

The boy’s eyelids fluttered. Impossible, but they fluttered. A faint color crawled back into his frozen skin. Warm breath exhaled from his blue lips.

The Author sat back on his heels, chest heaving. Cold air rushed in to fill the space his burning anger had opened.

Maybe I have gone soft, he thought. Maybe that’s what 2025 did: it taught us that smacking a child upside the head is no longer the answer we’re allowed to give.

And yet the boy was breathing.

He knelt there in the snow, the boy’s small, cold hand clamped inside his own, when it hit him—sudden and undeniable.

By pulling the boy out, he had done something.  

He had done something to stop this chaos from happening.  

To stop the pain, the suffering, the violence against people who do not share the same view.

This single act had broken the chain.

Retcon.  

Not erasure. Not denial. Just a step sideways into a margin wide enough for two people to stand in. A cold, quiet room before the tragedy hardens into canon. A place where an author can kneel in the snow, cup a half-frozen face between mittened hands, and say the thing that was never said the first time:

“I’m sorry. I made you carry a moral too sharp for your bones. I made purity your only choice. That was cruel.”

The boy’s eyes, still confused, looked up at him.

“I was so sure,” the boy whispered, his voice cracking.

“You were a child,” the Author said.

Around them the snow did not melt; it simply… waited. The town did not spring back to life, but the roofs stopped groaning. The wind dropped to a considerate hush. Nothing was undone, yet everything was suddenly negotiable.

Retcon.  

Not a trick. Not a cheat.  

A space.  

A step back.  

A place untouched by the politics and the squabbles—a real, quiet, breathing place where a person can finally kneel in the wreckage they wrote and say the one thing the old story never allowed:

I’m sorry.

The boy looked up at him, eyes wide, cheeks already cherry with life.

The Author felt the words leave him like an exhale that had been frozen for years.

“I’m sorry.”

You have this power as well.  

Reach in.  

Pull someone out.  

Say the sorry that should have been said the first time.

The retcon is real.  

It is the only revolution that ever truly thaws the snow.