ERASED FROM THE STORY

Prologue: THE INK THAT REMEMBERS

The world didn’t hate Nyra Wren—it simply didn’t notice her.

She drifted through life the way background characters did in novels. Silently. Softly. One face among millions in a gray city that pulsed with noise, neon, and forgotten dreams. Her small apartment buzzed with old electricity, and her window faced a brick wall that never changed, no matter the season.

Most days blurred into the next: wake, work, wait, repeat. Some nights she sat in the back of a dusty university library she no longer attended, pretending she still belonged there. Books were the only places that remembered her. Paper gave her what people did not—attention, purpose, escape.

And then came the book.

She didn’t know where it came from. It wasn’t catalogued in the library’s system. No author’s name. No barcode. Just a cracked leather cover with a silver-etched title:

A Crown of Silver and Flame.

Something about it called to her. The way it smelled of ink and ancient things, or the way the gold-tipped pages shone like they held more than just words. She read it in one night, breathless beneath her blanket as the characters unfolded like memories she had somehow forgotten.

The brave and kind heroine, Elira Solvenne Althear.

The noble, duty-bound prince, Cian Rathmore Elwynn.

The misunderstood villain cloaked in shadow, Lucien Vale Drayven.

And the world—lavender skies, spired castles, courts that glittered and cut.

She’d wept when the final page turned.

But something lingered. Something odd.

There was a passage she didn’t remember being there the first time. A single line, faintly inked at the margin of chapter thirty-one:

> “Nyra Caelith Veilborne—she was never meant to survive the story.”

Nyra’s breath caught.

It wasn’t just the name. It was the way it had been written: like a memory bleeding through the page. She reread the book, page by page, and discovered brief mentions of a girl—noble-born, unimportant, erased before the plot began. A name crossed out in red.

Nyra.

Her name.

Her name, but not.

In the silence of her apartment, heart pounding, she whispered to herself, “What kind of story forgets its own characters?”

No one answered.

But something in the book did.

The lights flickered. Her vision blurred. And as sleep pulled her under, she thought she saw the ink begin to move.

She woke to sunlight, silken sheets, and perfume on the air.

She was not in her apartment anymore.

And when the maid entered, curtsied, and softly said, “Good morning, Lady Nyra,” she understood one terrible truth:

She hadn’t just read the story.

She had become part of it.