Leo’s manuscript, titled Chronos Falls, was a monument to his writer’s block. He hadn’t touched it in months. The protagonist, a detective, was stuck, unable to solve a series of fictional thefts. So when Leo saw the news report about the daring midnight robbery at the city museum—a jade lioness snatched from a pressure-sensitive pedestal—a cold knot tightened in his stomach. He knew that crime.
He’d written it.
Fumbling through the printed pages, he found Chapter Seven. The description was perfect, down to the bypassed laser grid. It was a chapter he’d written but never published, never shown to anyone. Coincidence, he told himself. A sick, random coincidence.
Then it happened again. A fire in a waterfront warehouse, started by a chemical reaction in a specific storage drum. Leo’s heart hammered as he read the news, then his own text. It was verbatim. His fiction was a blueprint.
Panic curdled into a nauseating guilt. He was no longer a creator; he was a conduit for some terrible, prescient force. He tried to delete the file, but his computer froze. He burned the printouts, but the words persisted, seared behind his eyes. He was trapped in a nightmare of his own making, his creativity a weapon he didn't know how to holster.
Driven by a desperate need to break the cycle, he scrolled to the end of the manuscript. The final, unfinished chapter was a chaotic sketch. The detective, in a final confrontation, was to chase the culprit through the abandoned Grantham Textile Mill. The scene ended mid-sentence: “He rounded the corner, his foot catching on a loose—”
This was his chance. If he could get there, if he could intervene, he could change the outcome. He could stop the story from completing itself.
That night, Leo found himself standing in the rain outside the derelict mill, the printout of the final chapter clutched in his trembling hand. It was no longer about inspiration; it was about absolution. He slipped inside, the air thick with the smell of dust and decay.
He didn’t have to wait long. Footsteps echoed. A figure darted past, and a moment later, a man in a trench coat—a detective, just as he’d written—gave chase. The script was unfolding with terrifying precision.
Leo moved, not as a writer, but as a character in his own dreadful story. He saw the loose floorboard his protagonist was meant to trip on. As the detective charged around the corner, Leo lunged, shoving him out of the way. The detective stumbled but stayed upright, his eyes wide with confusion as he stared at Leo.
In that moment, the narrative shattered. The real culprit, a shadowy figure Leo had only ever described, hesitated at the far door, then vanished into the maze of looms. The arrest was made minutes later, the timeline altered, the fate he’d written undone.
Leo stood alone in the mill, the guilt easing its grip. He had learned a terrifying truth: some stories are hungry, and they feed on reality. He walked away, leaving the shadow manuscript behind, vowing to write only of light, safe things. But sometimes, in the quiet of the night, he would open a new document, and a single, ominous sentence would appear, unbidden, on the blank white screen.
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