The cursor blinks.
A rhythmic, digital heartbeat in a room that has forgotten how to breathe.
White.
Everything is too white. The screen is a void, a rectangular abyss that stares back at me with the silent arrogance of a god. It demands a soul, and I have none left to give. I've been sitting here for six hours, or perhaps six years. Time doesn't behave normally when your brain is a desert.
My name is Ryo Kanzaki, and I am a failure.
In the literary circles of Tokyo, they used to call me a prodigy. "The boy who hears the whispers of the psyche," they wrote. Now, I am just the man who pays his rent with dwindling savings and stares at a blinking line until his eyes bleed.
I reached for my coffee. It was cold. A thin film of dust had settled on the surface, reflecting the dim light of my desk lamp.
The silence in the apartment was heavy. It wasn't the peaceful silence of a library; it was the suffocating stillness of a tomb. Every creak of the floorboards sounded like a scream.
Then, a sound that didn't belong.
A metallic scrape.
It came from the front door. Subtle. Calculated. The sound of someone who knew that the world was asleep, or at least, that the world didn't care about a fourth-floor apartment in a crumbling building.
I didn't move.
I didn't feel fear. Not yet. Fear requires an imagination, and mine had been dead for months. Instead, I felt a strange, detached curiosity. It was the first interesting thing to happen in this room since I typed the word "The" last Tuesday.
The door groaned. A shadow slipped inside.
He was tall, wearing a grease-stained jacket that smelled of stale rain and desperation. In his hand, a knife glinted. It wasn't a professional's weapon. It was a kitchen knife, serrated and chipped.
The man froze when he saw me. He hadn't expected the lights to be on. He hadn't expected the failed prodigy to be awake, worshipping at the altar of his own inadequacy.
"Don't make a sound," he whispered. His voice was a jagged edge.
I looked at him. Truly looked at him.
I saw the tremor in his grip. I saw the dilated pupils, the sweat beading on a forehead that had seen too much sun and too little hope. He wasn't a monster. He was a mistake. A living, breathing error in the social fabric.
"What are you looking at?" he hissed, stepping closer.
"I was looking for a metaphor," I said. My voice sounded foreign to my own ears. Dry. Hollow.
He blinked, confusion momentarily overriding his aggression. "What?"
"I've been trying to describe the feeling of being trapped," I continued, my gaze never leaving his eyes. "I thought it was like being underwater. But looking at you... I realize I was wrong. It's not water. It's gravity. You're falling, aren't you? You've been falling for a long time."
"Shut up! Give me your wallet. Your phone. Everything."
He lunged. It was a clumsy movement, born of panic rather than skill.
I moved.
It wasn't a conscious decision. It was as if my body, weary of the mental stagnation, had decided to embrace a different kind of movement. I stepped to the side, my hand reaching out not to block, but to guide his momentum.
My fingers brushed his sleeve. The fabric was rough.
We collided. The desk lamp fell, crashing to the floor and plunging the room into a chaotic dance of shadows.
He swung the knife again. It caught the sleeve of my shirt, a sharp sting blooming on my forearm.
Red.
I saw a drop of blood hit the white keys of my mechanical keyboard.
The color was magnificent. Against the sterile white of my failure, that single drop of crimson looked like the most honest sentence ever written.
Something clicked.
A gear in the back of my skull, rusted and jammed for an eternity, suddenly turned.
The man grunted, trying to pin me against the desk. He was stronger, but he was chaotic. I was empty. And emptiness is a terrifyingly efficient vessel for precision.
My hand found the glass paperweight on my desk. It was a heavy, solid sphere of crystal—a gift from a publisher who had long since stopped calling.
I didn't think about the law. I didn't think about morality.
I thought about the rhythm.
I swung.
The impact was muffled. A dull thud against the side of his temple. He didn't scream. He just made a sound like a punctured lung—a soft, wet *hiss*.
He slumped to his knees, the knife clattering onto the floorboards.
He looked up at me, his eyes unfocused, a dark smear already beginning to trail down his face. He looked like he wanted to ask me a question. He looked like he wanted to know why the writer was being so violent.
I didn't give him an answer.
I grabbed his hair, pulling his head back. My heart wasn't racing. If anything, it had slowed down. My vision was sharp. I could see the individual pores on his skin. I could see the way the light reflected in the pool of blood forming on my desk.
"You're not a thief," I whispered into his ear. "You're a period. The end of a very long, very boring sentence."
I drove the paperweight down again. And again.
The sound of bone meeting glass is unique. It's not like the movies. It's more organic. More final.
Then, the stillness returned.
But it was different now. The tomb was gone. The room felt... electric.
I stood over him, my chest rising and falling in a slow, deliberate cadence. My hands were stained. My keyboard was ruined. The man—this intruder, this variable—lay twisted at my feet, his life leaking into my floorboards.
I looked at the computer screen.
The cursor was still blinking.
But the white void didn't look arrogant anymore. It looked hungry.
I sat down.
I ignored the cooling body. I ignored the sting in my arm. I ignored the fact that I had just crossed a line from which there is no return.
My fingers hovered over the keys.
*The first drop of ink is always the hardest to spill. It requires a sacrifice. Not of ink, but of blood.*
The words flowed. They didn't just appear; they erupted. It was as if a dam had burst inside my mind, releasing a torrent of dark, beautiful imagery that had been festering in the depths for years.
I typed for an hour. Two. The sun began to bleed through the blinds, casting orange bars across the room.
I stopped.
I felt a presence.
It wasn't the man on the floor. He was gone, a mere husk of meat and regret.
This was something else.
In the corner of the room, where the shadows were the thickest, something shifted. It didn't have a shape, not really. It was a density in the air, a cold spot that made the hair on my neck stand up.
"Beautiful," a voice drifted through the room.
It wasn't a sound. It was a thought that didn't belong to me, vibrating against the inside of my skull.
"The prose is... exquisite. Much better than that drivel you were trying to write yesterday."
I didn't turn around. I kept my eyes on the screen, reading the paragraph I had just finished. It was perfect. It was the best thing I had ever written.
"Who are you?" I asked.
"A fan," the voice replied. A flicker of movement in the peripheral of my vision. A tall, slender silhouette leaning against the wall. Eyes that weren't eyes, but pinpricks of dying stars. "And a collaborator."
I looked down at my hands. The blood had dried, turning a dark, crusty brown.
"He's still here," I said, nodding toward the body.
"He's the reason the words came back, Ryo. You know that, don't you?"
I did. That was the horror of it. I felt no guilt. I felt only a terrifying sense of relief. The void was filled. The desert was blooming with poisonous flowers.
"What happens now?" I asked.
The shadow stepped closer, the temperature in the room dropping until my breath misted in the air.
"Now?" the voice whispered, sounding almost affectionate. "Now, we see how many chapters it takes to finish a masterpiece. But tell me, Ryo..."
I felt a cold hand, or something like it, brush against my shoulder.
"...what will you do when you run out of ink?"
I looked at the body. Then I looked at the screen.
I realized with a jolt of cold clarity that I wasn't thinking about how to hide the corpse.
I was thinking about the next scene.
I reached for the mouse and clicked 'Save'.
The cursor continued to blink, waiting for the next kill.
I needed to find someone else. Not because I wanted to kill. But because I couldn't bear the thought of the screen going white again.
I looked at the shadow in the corner.
"I won't run out," I said.
The shadow smiled, a tear in the fabric of reality.
I picked up the phone. Not to call the police.
I called my editor.
"Mika?" I said, my voice steady, eyes fixed on the dead man's glazed expression. "I have the first chapter. It's... different."
I could hear her excitement on the other end. She didn't know. No one knew.
But as I hung up, I realized the man on the floor wasn't the only thing that had died tonight.
Ryo Kanzaki, the failed prodigy, was gone.
Something else had taken his seat at the desk.
And it was just getting started.
The only question left was how many people would have to die for me to reach 'The End'.
I looked at the blood on the 'Enter' key.
I pressed it.