I speak now of the quiet unraveling. Of the first scratch on the glass of a soul too young to know it is breaking.
He spent most of his days in the cabin now. Days that bled into one another, time slurring like watercolor. He slept less. Not because he couldn't, but because sleep no longer felt safe. It was during sleep that the door appeared. That the figure whispered.
He'd stopped telling himself it was a dream.
The mirror was still there.
So was the ink on his fingertips.
And the whispers—oh, the whispers—they had followed him.
They were never loud. Never angry. Just… persistent. Like voices from another room. Too far to hear clearly. Too close to forget.
At night, he'd lie awake and feel them brushing against the edges of his thoughts. They said no words, and yet he understood them.
"Ask again."
"Write."
"Climb."
He didn't write. Not yet.
Instead, he wandered.
The world had shifted. Not in grand, apocalyptic ways. But in the quiet, maddening ones. A shadow stretching in the wrong direction. The moon flickering for half a second, like a lightbulb. A flock of birds flying backward, then vanishing mid-air.
He tried to ignore it.
But the world would not let him.
⸻
One afternoon—if one could still call it that, with the sky dim and the sun bleeding gray—he wandered to the lake. It sat behind the woods, past where the old road crumbled into gravel. It had once been a place of peace, back when his parents were still alive.
He hadn't been there in years.
The path was overgrown. Brambles scratched at his legs. Trees leaned inward as if eavesdropping.
And then—he emerged.
The lake looked the same.
Still.
Glasslike.
Too still.
He walked to the water's edge and stared.
There was no reflection.
Only words.
They rippled across the surface, vanishing as they appeared. Phrases in dozens of languages. Names he'd never heard. One line repeated, over and over:
"This is where the story begins to bleed."
He reached out.
The water did not ripple.
It parted.
Like a page.
And in its depths, he saw not fish or stone—but letters. Billions, twisting like smoke, forming shapes and scenes. And in one of them—
—he saw himself.
Alone. Standing in the cabin. Writing.
"Write," the whispers said. "Begin."
"I don't know how," he whispered.
"You do. You always have."
He backed away from the lake.
The trees had moved.
They now formed a circle.
As if the forest were watching.
Silas turned and ran. Through thorns. Through fog. Through the hush of things that remembered.
When he burst into the clearing where his cabin stood, something was different.
A book lay on the porch.
Not the old notebook. A new one. Bound in grey leather. The spine pulsed faintly, like a heartbeat.
It hadn't been there before.
He picked it up.
There was no title.
Inside, the pages were blank.
But when he held the pen—
Words came.
Not his. Not really.
They used his hand.
He wrote the first line before he could stop:
"The boy stepped into the whisper of his world, not yet knowing that stories could bleed."
He dropped the pen.
The cabin creaked.
From the mirror in the corner, his reflection turned its head.
Silas did not.
Could not.
Sleep came for him like a hand over the mouth.
⸻
And so the Layer of Ink breathed him in.
He would not awaken to the same world.
Not because the world had changed—
But because he had.
Not in body.
But in story.