Please Stop Spreading Rumors About Me — They Keep Coming True Chapter 52: The Blank Page

I had imagined the Editor as many things, in the weeks since Xue Ningzhi first nad it. A monster. A void. A vast hungry dark.

I had not imagined it would be quiet. That it would be, in its way, almost gentle. That turned out to be the most horrifying thing about it.

We reached Willowre at dawn, and at first I thought we’d ridden to the wrong place, because Willowre was gone. Not destroyed — no rubble, no fire, no sign of violence. The buildings still stood. The wells still held water. The autumn gardens still grew. But there was no one in them. And worse — far worse — the place felt wrong, the way a word feels wrong when you’ve said it too many tis and it stops aning anything. Willowre had stopped aning. It was a town being slowly, gently un-written, and as we rode through its silent streets I felt my own mory of it sliding even as I looked at it — what was this town called? why are we here? was there a teacher? what was her—

"DON’T," the Scroll scread in my skull. "Talent, hold on to it, hold on to her NA, say it, SAY IT—"

"Mistress Hu," I gasped, clutching the teacher’s na like a rope — the na we’d lit into the sky two days before. "Her na was Mistress Hu, she taught the children of Willowre, we brought her ho—" and the sliding stopped, the na an anchor against a tide that wanted to wash everything smooth.

And then I felt the Editor.

It didn’t appear. It didn’t manifest. It was simply there, the way cold is there, the way silence is there — an absence so total it had a kind of presence, pressing in from the unwritten edges of the world. When it spoke, it didn’t speak the way the First Author did, with a voice. It spoke in the spaces. In the gaps between my thoughts, in the place where Willowre’s na kept trying to slide away. Quiet. Patient. Almost kind.

You’ve been lighting candles in my dark, it said, and there was no anger in it, which was so much worse than anger. Little lights. Little nas. Teaching the small things to hope. A pause that felt like a page turning. I’ve let you. It costs nothing to let a few candles burn. But this one — this teacher, this Willowre — you brought back sothing I had set down. And I cannot allow the living to believe that what is set down can be picked up again. So I am setting down the whole town. Gently. As a lesson.

"These are people," I said, my voice shaking with fury and terror. "You’re erasing an entire town of living people—"

I am giving them peace, the Editor said. The terrible thing — the thing that froze my blood — was that it ant it. You think rembering is a kindness, little light. You have it exactly backwards. Every grief in the world is a thing rembered. Every pain, every loss, every cruelty — all of it lives only because sothing refuses to forget it. I am not the villain of your story. I am its rcy. The unwriting pressed gentler, sweeter, almost loving. Imagine it. No more empty chairs, because no one rembers anyone to grieve. No more wounds, because no one rembers being hurt. No more war, no more loss, no more of this endless, screaming, rembering pain. Just the page, blank and clean and at peace, forever. That is what I offer. That is all I have ever offered. The end of suffering is the end of mory. Let set the world down, little light. Let it rest.

And gods help — for one mont, one single mont, standing in that gently dissolving town, I felt the pull of it. The seduction of the blank page. A world with no grief because there was nothing left to grieve. It would be so quiet. So peaceful. So free of all the pain that rembering drags behind it.

It was Yun Shu who broke it. Yun Shu, gripping my hand, her own face white with the effort of holding on to her own na, who said, fierce and clear: "No. A blank page isn’t peace, it’s just blank. You don’t end suffering by ending the people who suffer. The empty chair hurts — but it hurts because soone was loved, and I would rather hurt with the mory of love than feel nothing in an empty world. That’s not rcy. That’s just death, dressed up as kindness, because death is too honest a word for what you are."

Then you will hurt, the Editor said, without malice, until I set you down too. And the unwriting of Willowre deepened, the town sliding faster now toward the blank, and I felt the people in it — the living, breathing people, sowhere in those silent houses — beginning to dissolve into the smooth nothing, unrembered, unmade, gone—

And I did the only thing I have ever known how to do.

I planted my feet in the dissolving street. I reached for the one thing the Editor could not take from — because it was the one thing in all the world that cannot be unwritten — and I rembered, out loud, with everything I had, with the unerasable light of a na the whole world knew and loved and could not forget.

"WILLOWRE!" I roared, and my voice was the voice of a Storied legend, ten million believers behind it, a light that could not be put out. "MISTRESS HU TAUGHT HERE! THE BAKER ON THE CORNER IS NAD OLD TIE! THERE ARE NINETEEN CHILDREN IN THIS TOWN AND I AM GOING TO LEARN EVERY ONE OF THEIR NAS! THIS TOWN IS REMBERED! THIS TOWN IS KNOWN! AND YOU CANNOT BLANK WHAT THE WHOLE WORLD WILL NOT FORGET!"

And here is what we learned, in that dissolving street — the most important thing in the whole war:

The Editor could unwrite anything in the world.

Except a thing held by a light it could not extinguish.

My unerasable na — the fraud’s na, the known-and-loved na with no seam — poured out into Willowre, and where it touched, the unwriting stopped. The dissolving streets fird. The sliding nas anchored. The Editor’s gentle, patient tide broke against the one rock in all the world it could not wash away: a story too true, too known, too loved to be forgotten. I couldn’t save the whole town at once — I wasn’t strong enough yet, and where my light didn’t reach, the blanking crept on — but where I stood, where I rembered loud enough, the page refused to go blank.

...Interesting, the Editor said, and for the first ti there was sothing in it that was not gentle. Sothing that was almost, but not quite, afraid. A light I cannot put out. So that is what woke . A pause like a held breath. You think you have found a weapon, little light. You have found only a delay. You are one na. I am the silence under all nas. You cannot hold the whole world in your voice forever. The presence began to withdraw, the blanking slowing but not stopping, leaving Willowre half-dissolved and trembling on the edge of nothing. But you have made curious. I have not been curious in a very long ti. I will be watching, unerasable little light. And when you finally reach for the brightest gap — when you try to bring back the Lantern — I will be there. Because that is the mont your light burns brightest. And the brightest light, little one, casts the deepest dark.

And it was gone, and the world rushed back, and Willowre stood half-real and shaking around us — so of it saved, so of it blanked forever, a town with holes in it now, but alive, its people staggering out of their houses clutching their own half-restored nas.

We spent three days putting Willowre back together, na by na, learning every soul, lighting the blanked parts ho. We saved most of it. Not all. There were people the Editor set down before I reached them who we could not, with all our rembering, fully bring back — gaps in the town now, small and terrible, that the people would keep empty chairs for.

But we’d learned the thing that mattered.

"It can be fought," I said quietly, that last night, looking up at the half-healed sky over Willowre. "The Editor. The thing that unwrites the world. It can be fought — by a light it can’t put out. By rembering loud enough." I looked at my exhausted, soot-streaked, triumphant family. "That’s . That’s what I’m for. The unerasable na. The one thing the dark can’t blank." I swallowed. "And soday soon, it’s going to co down to my one light against all the silence under the world, over the brightest gap in the sky. And I’m going to have to be bright enough to hold it."

"Then we’d better make you bright enough," said Yun Shu, and took my hand again, and did not let go.

The Scroll, gazing up at where Su Yue’s gap waited, made a small sound — equal parts terror and, sohow, hope.

"The brightest light casts the deepest dark," it whispered, repeating the Editor’s words. "Talent. When we go for Su Yue — it’ll be the brightest you’ve ever burned. And the dark will be deeper than anything." A pause. "But maybe — maybe a light that can’t go out is exactly the light you want burning, when the deepest dark cos for you."

"Yeah," I said softly, and held the noodle pot, and looked up at the gap that was, every day, a little less like a wound and a little more like a door. "Let’s go get brighter."

The war to rember had t its true enemy at last.

And learned it could bleed.