Written In Red: The World I Failed To Finish

The only sound in Milly’s bedroom was the rhythmic scratching of her pen against paper and the dull hum of the radiator.

Outside, her home city was blanketed in a quiet, uneventful drizzle, but inside her head, it was pouring.

She leaned back in her desk chair, rubbing her tired eyes, and looked down at her open notebook. For the past two hours, she has been meticulously outlining a treasonous plot, completely lost in the secret, sprawling high-fantasy world she had spent years building. It was her sanctuary. She had never published it online and never uttered a single word about it to her friends.

The universe of Frostfire Glade belonged entirely, exclusively to her.

Milly stood up to grab a glass of water, stretching the stiffness out of her shoulders. When she returned to her dest, she almost knocked her mug over. Sitting dead center on her keyboard, right next to her open notebook, was an envelope. Milly frowned, picking it up. It hadn't been there two minutes ago. It wasn't standard printer paper, either. The envelope was made of thick, cream-colored parchment that felt heavy and rough against her fingertips. There was no stamp, no return address, just her name. Milly. Written in an elegant, sweeping calligraphy she didn't recognize.

Curiosity overcoming her confusion, she flipped it over. It was sealed shut with a stamp of dark crimson wax, pressed with the crest of a serpent.

A jolt of pure ice shot through her chest. She knew that crest. She had spent three hours designing it on her computer just last month. It was the royal seal of the disgraced Prince Roderick.

Her hands trembled slightly as she broke the wax and pulled out the thick sheet of parchment folded inside.

'Milly,

You always had a flair for the dramatic, though you seem to have forgotten the most important part: a story is a two-way street. You've spent so much time deciding my fate from behind your desk, watching me from afar like a ghost. But I am no longer content to be watched. If you won't finish our story, I will force you to live it.'

Milly dropped the paper as if it had caught fire. It fluttered to the floor, innocent and impossible.

"Very funny," she whispered to the empty room. "Is this a joke?"

It had to be a prank. Someone had hacked her laptop. Someone had gone through her digital art folders, read her private documents, and gone through an incredible amount of trouble to by parchment and wax just to mess with her. That was the only explanation. Prince Roderick was a tyrant made of ink and imagination.

Desperate to prove to herself that her world was still under her control, Milly grabbed her notebook to check her character outlines. She just needed to see her own messy handwriting. She flipped past her map of Mistwood Grove, reaching the blank pages at the back were she planned to draft the next chapter.

The pages weren't blank anymore.

Covering the previously white paper was a frantic, jagged script. Written in a dark, rust-colored ink that definitely didn't belong to her pen. The handwriting was aggressive, slicing through the lines of the paper, repeating repeating the same phrases over and over in a chaotic, dizzying spiral.

YOU OWE US AN ENDING. WE'VE BEEN WAITING. YOU OWE US AN ENDING. WE'VE BEEN WAITING.

the radiator clicked off. The silence in her room suddenly felt entirely too loud, and the ink on her pages looked horribe and unnerving.

Milly's head swam. The words on the page seemed to pulse with a rhythm that matched her own heartbeat. She sat down in her dest chair. Her eyelids felt leaden, heavy with a fatigue that hadn't been there moments ago.

'Just rest your eyes for a second.' A voice whispered, though she couldn’t tell if it came from somewhere in her room or the back of her own mind.

She slumped forward, her forehead hitting the keyboard with a soft clack.

The hum of the computer fan grew louder, escalating into a high-pitched whine, and then, silence swallowed everything.

When she opened her eyes, the dull glow of her monitor was gone. She was cold. A biting, pine-scented wind whipped at her face, tearing at her hair she didn’t recognize. Her bleached white hair was now black. It felt longer, tangled, and heavier then her own. She tried to push herself up, but her limbs felt foreign, moving with a grace and predatory tension thay made her skin crawl.

Milly, or rather, the person she was currently trapped inside, was lying on a bed of damp moss in a forest she knew better then her own backyard. towering, silver-barked trees loomed over head, their branches woven into a canopy that blotted out the sky.

She scrambled to her feet, expecting the familiar stiffness of her desk chair, but her legs moved with effortless, lethal speed. Panic flared in her chest. She reached for the notebook she had been holding but there was nothing in her hands but the hilt of a dagger, strapped securely to her hip.

she was in Frostfire Glade. The very world she had painstakingly built.