The blunt wooden practice sword cracked across the boy's cheekbone, splintering pine and spraying crimson across the raked gravel. "Get up, Bogus," Zorian Voron murmured. His posture remained immaculate, feet set shoulder-width apart in the traditional high-guard of the Kestrel Guard Academy. His gray practice tunic lacked even a single smudge of chalk or sweat. "A future vanguard does not lie down because of a love tap." On the dirt, the bruised initiate gagged, spitting out two yellowed molars. He reached for his dropped stave, fingers trembling. Zorian took one clean step forward and brought his heel down on the boy's knuckles. The crunch sounded like dry kindling. Bogus screamed, a high, wet sound that died into choked sobs as Zorian leaned his entire bodyweight onto the crushed joint, grinding the bootsoles against raw bone. "Yield with words, not groveling," Zorian said. His mouth curved into an easy, boyish smirk that the crowd of aristocratic spectators regarded with approving murmurs. "Or don't. Endurance is a virtue here in Volhynia." Ten paces back, standing among the reserve cadets with a spare water skin slung over my narrow shoulder, I stared at Zorian's hands. This was Chapter Four. I wrote this scene three years ago in a smoke-choked studio apartment above a laundromat, fueled by cheap instant noodles and bitter spite. In my draft, Zorian Voron was supposed to disarm his haughty noble rival with an effortless flourish, offer a hand to help him up, and deliver a platitude about shared brotherhood before the instructors stepped in. The readers had eaten it up. They called Zorian a shining beacon of honor, the classic virtuous hero who rose from nothing. There was no honor in that grind of the heel. The cold delight dancing in Zorian's pupils had never existed in my text. He wasn't playing the humble prodigy; he was savoring the destruction of an insect. "Enough! Match to Voron!" Master Borz bellowed from the edge of the ring, waving a heavy iron baton. "Next pair, clear the circle!" Zorian lifted his boot. He stepped over the weeping cadet as though avoiding a patch of mud, his gaze drifting lazily across the line of second-tier students until it pinned me. "Patryk," Zorian called out, his tone warm, fraternal, and entirely rotten underneath. "Wipe my blade, will you? Some gutter pig got grease on the pommel." My fingers dug into the cracked leather of the rag at my waist. I moved because this body's reflexes answered before my brain could stop them. Patryk Sova. That was who I inhabited now. A cowardly, dim-witted hanger-on from a bankrupt provincial barony, created solely to puff up the protagonist's ego and provide comic relief before being gutted in Chapter Fourteen by a Gloomwood skirmisher to prove the story had 'dark stakes.' I was slated to die in twelve days. I hurried forward, keeping my head bowed, hunched into the subservient slouch I had scripted for this clown. "Right away, Zorian. Beautiful strike, by the way. Nobody moves like you." The sycophancy tasted like ash, but Zorian smiled broadly, tossing the practice blade toward my chest. I caught it awkwardly, nearly fumbling the hilt. "You're clumsy, Patryk, but at least you're loyal," Zorian said softly, stepping close enough that only I could hear the flat, dead cadence behind his golden boy charm. "Don't lose that. The day you stop being useful is the day I let Borz pair us up for live steel." He patted my cheek—two hard, mocking slaps that stung—and walked toward the terrace benches where the junior daughters of House Kost were clustered. I stared at his straight back. The sun hit his copper-trimmed collar, the mark of an aspirant destined for a divine Inscription. He wasn't my noble hero. He was a monster wearing the face I gave him, and the world I built had no safety net for the fool who stood in his shadow. If Chapter Fourteen played out as written, a Gloomwood stalker would rip my belly open in the academy courtyard while Zorian stood by, using my screams to measure the beast's attack patterns before landing the killing blow. He would weep over my corpse, earn Anja Kost's sympathy, and claim my family's heirloom ring for his collection. Not a chance. I didn't finish wiping the blade. I dumped the oiled rag into the equipment bucket, turned my back on the drills, and slipped out through the courtyard's southern colonnade. The eastern barracks smelled of damp stone and boiled cabbage. Room forty-two belonged to Patryk Sova alone, a privilege granted not by status, but because no other cadet wanted to share quarters with a snoring, unwashed parasite. I locked the heavy iron bolt behind me, my palms slick with sweat. Think. Marek, think. I created this castle. I designed the foundations during an obsessive world-building binge when I still believed a publishing contract would save my life. The room numbers, the masonry marks, the hidden dead-drops built into the ancient keep's pre-war architecture— There was an emergency escape route under the south bastion, but it required an Inscribed sigil to open. I had no Inscription. My spiritual channels were dry clay. I dropped to my knees beside the cot. The floorboards were rough-hewn ash, grayed with age and pinned with flat-headed iron nails. Three paces from the bedpost. Two planks from the wall seam. In the original lore, every room in the south wing had once housed an inquisitor of the Sunstone Synod. When I outlined the setting, I hid a cache here for a plotline I later scrapped to meet a weekly word-count deadline. It was supposed to hold a ring of shielding. I pulled a short bone-handled scraping knife from my boot and jammed the tip into the seam. The wood groaned. With a hard, upward wrench, the iron nails pulled free from the joist with a dull screech. Dust puffed into my face. Beneath the gap, wrapped in oiled lambskin, sat an iron lockbox. The brass tumbler on the front was locked tight, carved with three interlocking gears. I knew the combination. Four-nine-one. The day my first manuscript was rejected. Click. The latch popped open. I tore the lid back, bracing myself for the blue glow of an enchanted talisman, some divine relic that could crack Zorian's skull before he had the chance to feed me to the woods. There was no ring. Inside the box rested a single sheet of paper. Modern, wood-pulp paper—bleached, smooth, completely alien to the rough parchment of Volhynia. And resting on top of it was a black, disposable rollerball pen with a chewed plastic cap. I lifted the paper. The blue ink was stark, precise, and entirely unmistakable. It was my handwriting. Not Patryk's clumsy, blotchy scrawl, but the cramped, left-leaning cursive I had used on Earth until the night my computer screen went black. *This is not an accident.* *This is revenge.* *Follow your script until the Murkwing sings at dusk.* I tapped the seam of the pen, feeling the cheap seam left by an injection mold. Cold. Real. Manufactured on an assembly line ten thousand miles and an entire reality away. Someone had put me here on purpose. Someone who knew my drafts, my trash bin, my secrets. Outside the narrow, unglazed window, the sky bruised purple over the Kestrel spires as the sun dipped beneath the jagged canopy of the Gloomwood. From the high eaves above the barracks, a harsh, chittering shriek pierced the quiet of twilight.

The First Unwritten Page