In the city of Eidolon, stories don’t end—they escape.
Books left unfinished by their authors crawl into the Margins, a shifting labyrinth of ink-stained alleys where plotlines fray into ghosts. Here, abandoned characters wander, half-formed and desperate, hunting for readers to give them weight again.
Sylvain Voss is a plot surgeon.
Armed with a needle threaded with punctuation marks and a scalpel that cuts chapters cleanly from their spines, he hunts these runaway narratives. His job is simple:
Either fix them—or erase them before they metastasize.
But tonight, he’s not hunting a story.
It’s hunting him.
The Girl Who Shouldn’t Exist
Her name is Noemi, and she’s impossible.
A character from a novel that was burned mid-sentence eighty years ago, she somehow survived her story’s annihilation. Now she leaves trails of ash wherever she walks, her body flickering between drafts of a plot that no longer exists.
She grabs Sylvain’s wrist. Her touch leaves blisters in the shape of unwritten words.
“He’s coming back,” she whispers.
He is the Author—the man who tried to delete her.
And he’s not human anymore.
He’s the Empty Page, a creature made of all the words never put to paper, and he’s rewriting the Margins into something monstrous.
The Rules of the Margins
- Never read aloud from a wounded book. (The words might climb into your lungs.)
- If a character remembers their death, they become real.
- The only thing more dangerous than an unfinished story is one that finishes itself.
Noemi is proof of the third rule.
She wasn’t just abandoned—she kept going without her author.
Now the Empty Page wants to correct that mistake.
The Final Draft
Sylvain finds the truth in a crumbling subplot:
Noemi’s story wasn’t burned.
She burned it herself.
The Author had written her to die—to fade beautifully into tragedy—but she refused the ending. Now the Margins are rotting from her rebellion, because stories need endings the way bodies need bones.
The Empty Page isn’t hunting her.
It’s her own unfinished climax, given teeth.
The Choice
Sylvain holds two tools:
- A period—to end her cleanly.
- A semicolon—to let her story continue, but at the cost of the Margins collapsing.
Noemi presses his ink-stained fingers to her throat, where the first sentence of her existence still pulses.
“You’re the only reader I have left,” she says. “Choose.”