Silas opened his eyes to a world of jagged, unfinished edges and the sharp, metallic tang of ozone. The air tasted like a burnt circuit board. He lay on a mound of what should have been trash, but the shapes were wrong. His fingers brushed against a discarded texture, a patch of rough brickwork that had been stripped from a wall. It felt like dry sand between his teeth, a gritty sensation that didn't match the visual of the red clay.
He tried to push himself up, but his right hand passed straight through a cluster of low-resolution grass. The blades were green smears of light, lacking any physical substance. They felt like cold smoke against his palm. As he struggled to find purchase, a sharp, insistent tug at his chest pulled him toward the ceiling of the world. The sky wasn't blue; it was a blinding, hungry white void known as the Bleed.
His body felt dangerously light, like a stray thought that was about to be forgotten. Silas lunged for a rusted iron beam buried deep in the slag. His knuckles turned a translucent, ghostly blue as he gripped the metal. The beam was heavy, anchored by a density he no longer possessed. He clung to it, feeling the terrifying pull of the abyss above trying to claim his weightless frame.
'Not yet,' Silas whispered.
His voice sounded thin and distant. It was the sound of a recording played from another room, muffled by thick walls. He was a man who had been Censored, his name and his mass scrubbed from the social fabric until he was little more than a smudge on the glass.
To the east, the horizon began to flicker. The solid stone plates of the Manuscript were dissolving into a grid of shimmering, green-black pixels. The sunrise was coming, and with it, the Revision. Anything not anchored by the weight of Ink would be wiped clean, edited out of existence to make room for a new day.
Silas kicked off a pile of discarded cobblestones. His boots made no sound against the hollow, unrendered ground. The silence was more unnerving than a crash would have been. He watched a nearby stack of wooden crates lose their color. They turned into flat, gray wireframes, their geometry exposed as the Revision wave drew closer.
'I need to move,' he thought, his pulse thundering in a chest he could almost see through.
He dragged his torso over a ridge of discarded armor plating. The metal was cold and heavy, one of the few things in this dump with enough Permanence to keep him from drifting away. He moved like a mountaineer, hand over hand, treating the ground as a vertical cliff. If he let go, he wouldn't fall. He would rise into the white nothingness and vanish forever.
A sudden gust of wind from the Bleed below caught his cloak. The fabric snapped violently, nearly lifting him off the slag heap like a kite. Silas dug his fingers into a deep crack in a massive stone pillar. This pillar was different from the rest of the trash. It was carved with deep grooves and felt impossibly solid. It had enough Permanence to resist the wind, standing like a tombstone in a graveyard of glitches.
His vision blurred at the edges. A static-like hum vibrated in his teeth, a sign that his physical weight was continuing to bleed away. The more he exerted himself, the more transparent he became.
"Stay down," Silas muttered to himself.
He forced his translucent legs to find purchase on a slab of discarded granite. He needed to reach the perimeter. Above the chaos of the slag heap sat a high wall of dark, ink-stained basalt. It was the edge of the stable world, a place where the geometry was locked and the air was thick with the smell of old books and wet pavement.
Between Silas and that wall lay a field of glitching textures. The ground there was a nightmare of fluctuating data. One moment it was solid stone, and the next it was empty air, flickering at a frequency that made his eyes ache.
'Timing is everything,' he told himself, watching the patterns.
Silas lunged for a floating piece of masonry. He caught it just as the ground beneath his previous position vanished into a cloud of fine white dust. He hung there, suspended over the blinding white of the Bleed. His heart hammered against ribs he could barely see. The masonry piece was small, barely the size of a chair, but it was anchored to a hidden line of code that kept it level.
He hauled himself onto the floating stone, his breath coming in ragged gasps. The air was too thin to fog, and his lungs felt like they were straining to catch shadows. Behind him, the pixelation on the horizon accelerated. A wave of pure white light began to eat the furthest reaches of the slag heap, turning the discarded history of the world into a blank page.
Silas spotted a discarded anchor-chain trailing from the top of the basalt wall. It swayed in the wind, a heavy line of iron links that looked like a lifeline. He calculated the distance with a desperate, wide-eyed stare. It was a jump he could never make if he were a normal man, but mass was a luxury he no longer had.
He leaped.
His body glided through the air with terrifying ease. He felt like a dandelion seed caught in a gale. For a second, he thought he had overshot it, that the wind would carry him past the wall and into the sky. Then his hands slammed into the cold, heavy iron of the chain.
The weight of the metal nearly wrenched his ghostly arms from their sockets. The chain was heavy with Ink, a physical anchor that fought against his desire to float. He groaned, the sound a low-frequency buzz in his throat, and began to climb hand over hand. The metal links bit into his palms with a grounding, painful reality. The pain was good. Pain meant he was still part of the world.
Below him, the slag heap began to scream. It wasn't a human sound, but the screech of matter being unmade. The discarded textures dissolved into pure white noise as the Revision wave hit the base of the wall. The world Silas had just crawled through was being overwritten, deleted by the blinding light of the dawn.
Silas reached the top of the basalt wall and rolled onto the solid, ink-heavy floor of the perimeter. He didn't stop until he was several feet away from the edge. He pressed his face against the cold stone, feeling the density of the world finally holding him down against the sky. The floor here was dark, stained with centuries of spilled Ink and the weight of a billion recorded lives.
He lay there for a long time, waiting for his heart to slow. The static in his vision cleared, replaced by the sharp, high-contrast shadows of the city beyond the wall.
A shadow fell over him. Silas looked up to see a man standing a few yards away. The stranger wore a heavy leather coat reinforced with brass plates. He carried a long pole with a hook on the end, and a row of heavy glass vials hung from his belt. The scavenger watched Silas with a mixture of pity and professional greed.
"You're a light one, aren't you?" the scavenger said. His voice was deep and resonant, the sound of a man who belonged in the Manuscript.
The man reached down and tapped one of the heavy vials at his belt. The black fluid inside shimmered with an oily, iridescent light. It looked heavy. It looked like gravity.
Silas stared at the vial, his fingers twitching against the stone floor. That black fluid was the only thing that could stop his erasure. It was the weight he needed to survive the next dawn, and he would have to take it.
'I need that ink,' Silas thought, his gaze narrowing as he measured the scavenger's stance.
The scavenger didn't move, his hand lingering near a short, serrated blade tucked into his waistband. The Revision wave hit the base of the wall with a final, thundering pulse of white light, leaving only the two of them in the sudden, eerie silence of the morning.