The hundredth sigh tonight leaves me like steam from an overworked kettle, thin and exhausted. My back sinks into the merciless flatness of my mattress, springs groaning like old men muttering about “the good old days.” Above me, the wooden ceiling glares down, empty and splintered, the perfect metaphor for my career right now.

“Why can’t I get this damn manuscript working!?” My voice startles the silence, bouncing off the thin walls as if trying to escape the apartment entirely.

I dig my fingers into my hair, scalp prickling. “At this rate, I’ll go bald before I even get to halfway,” I grumble, the laugh that follows more like a dying cough.

It’s my first and last chance to finish Piercing Storm. If I fail, I’m not just losing a project ... I’m burying what’s left of my dignity.

Once, my name had weight in the YA industry. I was the “lightning girl,” the prodigy who hit the bestseller list at nineteen. People told me my words could “paint the wind.” Now I’m a 24-year-old ghost haunting a one-room apartment, living off instant noodles and discount sushi trays I have to smell first to be sure they’re safe.

I should be writing. Instead, my eyes drift to the “Graveyard” folder on my desktop.

Over a hundred manuscripts abandoned mid-chapter. Stories that felt perfect in my head but collapsed on the page. My graveyard is haunted with brilliant openings and dead middles. I’ve always told myself I left them behind for “polishing” later. But I never go back.

The radiator wheezes like it’s judging me. My desk is a battlefield of coffee-stained notes, crooked sketches, half-formed metaphors. “Lightning tastes like regret” is scrawled in the center of one page, double-underlined. Another page reads, in my messy block letters: “Kael meets the storm here.”

Right on cue, rain begins outside. Not a drizzle, no.... a scene-setting downpour, the exact kind I wanted for Chapter Fourteen when Kael finally confronts the storm. Maybe he could awaken some abilities or literally get fried by lightning and transmigrate somewhere...or perhaps he gets drenched and realises he's a delusional idiot who won't gain any powers by following some instructions from an old anime or manga.

My laptop’s screen glows from the desk, smug as a cat who knows you can’t make it move.

> Chapter 14: The Tempest Breathes.

That’s all it says. Just the title and the blinking cursor — mocking me with each pulse, like it’s laughing in Morse code.

“Fine,” I mutter, standing. “Five minutes of writing, or I’m giving up and calling ramen ‘creative research.’”

I sit. Fingers hover above the keyboard. My mind scrapes together images.

The black, roaring sea; the gleam of Kael’s blade; the way the storm speaks in a language no human should hear...

—and the screen blinks.

Not the normal gentle refresh. The letters stretch.

“...What?”

The chapter heading bends like hot wax. The '14' melts into a squiggle. Words ripple, shiver, and; in slow, terrible motion ... slide right off the page.

They hit the floor with wet, inky splats.

I shove my chair back, my pulse turning into a drumbeat in my ears.

A whole sentence, 'The storm’s breath smelled like rain and rage' , slithers across the floor like a living ribbon and vanishes under my bed. A fragment of dialogue clings to my wrist, burning into my skin like fresh ink on paper.

The lights flicker.

The rain’s rhythm outside shifts. Now it matches the pulsing of the cursor. The air smells sharp, like printer toner and lightning.

And then the floor tilts.

Not the apartment floor. Not the bed. The story.

---

I blink and I’m knee-deep in black water, cold slicing into my bones through soaked isekai-themed pajama socks. The taste of salt coats my lips.

The sky above churns — not gray, not blue, but the color of a migraine, bruised and aching. Lightning veins tear across the clouds like cracks in old glass.

And there’s Kael.

He stands exactly as I wrote him months ago.

Royal-blue hair like he cut it himself with a dagger, emerald-green eyes sharp enough to split granite, dark-grey coat whipping in a wind that smells faintly of ozone and ash.

But he’s not looking at the horizon like a good little protagonist. 'Well... not so little on the physical aspect,' I chuckled...commending my imagination on making such a man.

He’s glaring at me.

“You’re late,” he says.

“What?”

“Three months. You left me in Chapter Thirteen for three months.” His voice is deep, worn raw, the voice of someone who’s been pacing inside a sentence too long. “Do you know how long I’ve been standing on this damn cliff, waiting for the storm to ‘breathe’?” He air-quotes so hard his gloves creak.

“I—”

“Also,” he adds, raising his sword, “it’s been stuck in a comma splice this whole time. Hurts like hell.”

Only then do I notice the floating, oversized comma.

Pale, pulsing faintly ... wrapped around the blade like a snake.

My stomach drops. “This… can’t be real.”

He tilts his head. “Author, you’ve never been more real to me.”

Uh...yep. Definitely the sometimes cocky bastard of a protagonist I made.

*sighs in disbelief*

---

The sea behind us bulges like something’s trying to surface. A creature hauls itself from the water. A typo beast, its body a writhing mess of misspelled words fused into dripping black muscle. Its eyes are two warped “O”s. It roars, and the sound is pure keyboard smash: “asldkfj!!”

Kael yanks at his sword. “Thanks for the handicap,” he grits.

I glance around, desperate for a rulebook, and spot pages fluttering in the wind. My own abandoned notes. I grab one, fling it at the beast. The page slaps onto its arm. The letters shimmer, rearranging into their proper spelling. The arm reforms into something less monstrous. The creature staggers.

“More!” Kael shouts.

I rip pages from my pocket, hurling metaphors like weapons until the beast collapses into a harmless puddle of ink.

I don’t get two seconds before the next disaster arrives.

A man in a ridiculous feathered hat stomping toward me. “You! You cut me from Chapter Six!” He jabs a gloved finger at my chest. “My tragic backstory was art! I had a pet falcon!” His voice had a mix of both frustration and sorrow masking pride.

The margins themselves! rebel next, curling into black tendrils of ink.

My own scribbled notes come alive, wrapping around my neck:

“Too cliché.”

“Overdone trope.”

“Try harder.”

The more I try to free myself, the tighter they got. Does my  work resent me this much too!?

Kael slices them apart, comma still dangling from his sword. “Control your story!”

“I’m trying!”

“Write it!”

I dig out a pen that had somehow been hiding in my pajama trouser pocket.

With shaking hands, I scrawl:

> The marginalia dissolve into harmless smudges.

And then, the tension thickened.

At the brink of cussing at my life choices and choosing to perish with my imperfect perfections....

They hiss and vanish.

---

We run. Kael says the “last page” is the only exit.

My poor handsome protagonist was helping his amasing author despite the grudge I very well knew and felt he held against me. One wrong move and he'd snap my neck at any moment.

If it wasn't for our escape, this ... thing would've drowned me as soon as I arrived here.

The world shakes with genre quakes.

One moment we’re on a windswept cliff, the next in a neon-lit cyberpunk street, then suddenly inside a pastel rom-com café where the rain outside turns to glitter. The floor here smells like sugar and betrayal.

Plot Holes gape in the ground, sucking in entire buildings and side characters. They whisper in my own voice: You’ll never finish. You’re a coward. Why try?

I write while sprinting.

> Somehow, a bridge appeared.

A bridge forms, but it’s made entirely of spaghetti. We cross anyway, noodles swaying under our weight.

---

The final page looms ahead.

A massive sheet of glowing paper, words pulsing faintly like a heartbeat.

I scrawl the last line with trembling hands. Feeling my violent pulse in my palms, I stole quick glances from Kael. There he was with his majestic self and proud demeanor I dared not question where it came from.

Waiting.... waiting for me to make a choice.

My wrist settled and my fingers with my 'not so great' handwriting, scribbled:

> Kael stepped into the sun, free at last.

The page folds around me like a closing book. I’m yanked backward through a tunnel of paper, the smell of ink thick in my lungs.

I crash onto my bed. The laptop screen blinks: The End.

I laugh.

A shaky, tear-streaked mess.

Relief flooding me.

My chest heaving up and down as though I had survived an entire apocalypse myself.

Then I notice it. A sentence I didn’t write, tucked into the corner in italics:

> But the author never knew the storm had followed her home.

Thunder growls outside.

From the shadows under my desk, a comma wriggles.

Woke Up in My Own Sequel

The comma is still under my desk.

It’s been a week since I 'escaped' Piercing Storm, but that pale, pulsing, oversized punctuation mark is exactly where I saw it last. Curled like a sleeping snake. I’ve been pretending not to notice it. Like maybe if I ignore it long enough, it’ll fade away.

It hasn’t.

In fact, it’s humming now.

I pause mid-coffee-sip, staring at the thing. My mug trembles in my hand. Somewhere in the walls, the radiator clicks like a metronome.

That’s when the text appears.

Floating, translucent, two inches above my coffee table:

> She blinked twice, trying to pretend the words weren’t there.

I do blink twice. Hard. But the sentence stays.

“Nope,” I say out loud to nobody, because of course I live alone. “Nope. Nope. Nope—”

The sound of the fridge door slamming makes me jump.

I spin, nearly spilling coffee, and freeze.

Kael is leaning against the fridge like it’s a tree in the middle of a battlefield. His coat’s dry even though it’s pouring outside. His boots are leaving wet, inky footprints on my linoleum.

“What—how—” I stammer.

“Morning,” he says, pulling out a carton of milk like this is the most natural thing in the world. “You’re out of cereal.”

“I don’t even own cereal.”

“You do now.” He gestures at the kitchen counter, where a bright-red cereal box with the words Storm-O’s printed in bold block letters sits ... and I swear it wasn’t there thirty seconds ago. A cartoon version of Kael is on the box, smirking while lightning bolts shoot from his spoon.

I rub my eyes. “This is a dream. Or a breakdown. Or both.”

He takes a bite straight from the box. “Neither. You’ve got a bigger problem.”

The rain outside slows. Stops. Mid-air. Droplets just… hang there, frozen, glittering in the gray light.

Something moves in one of them.

I lean closer to the window. My stomach knots. Inside one suspended raindrop, there’s an entire scene. A burning city I’ve never written, people running in the streets, a man in a ridiculous feathered hat holding a glowing pen.

“Oh, hell no,” I whisper.

Kael crunches another mouthful of cereal. “The villain you cut from Chapter Six? He’s loose.”

I turn from the window to glare at him. “I cut him because he was ridiculous. He kept monologuing about soup.”

“He’s still ridiculous. Now he has The Master Pen.” Kael tosses me something. A small scrap of paper. Words writhe across it like worms:

REALITY IS FIRST DRAFT NOW.

Before I can ask what that means, the floor shakes. The radiator melts into an upright piano. My kitchen table grows sails.

Kael grabs my wrist. “Welcome to your sequel, Author.”

The humming comma under my desk begins to glow.