The hour was late, the kind of hour where even silence felt alive. The study glowed faintly with the wavering light of a candelabra, shadows stretched long across the velvet-draped walls, and the only sound was the soft scratch of a pen racing across parchment. Edgar sat hunched at his desk, every muscle tense, every breath shallow, as though the weight of the novel in his hands was something greater than mere words. Weeks of sleepless nights lingered in the shadows beneath his eyes, yet still he wrote, driven by that ceaseless hunger for perfection.

But then—

A single tremor. A slip of his weary arm. The inkwell toppled. The room seemed to exhale as blackness poured across the desk, bleeding through page after page of his manuscript. The words he had labored for, the fragile fragments of his mind laid bare, were drowned in thick, merciless ink.

A raw, fractured yell escaped him, the kind that ripped from the chest before he even realized it. He lurched forward, fingers clawing desperately at the ruined pages as though he could save them, but the ink only smeared further, swallowing everything. His chest heaved, trembling hands stained black, his voice breaking in a whisper that cracked like glass.

“It’s gone… all of it. My words, my soul—consumed in a single instant.”

By the time his partner reached the study, the sight was devastating. Edgar sat motionless in his chair, rigid yet trembling, his face ghostly pale under the candlelight. His eyes—wide, shimmering with despair—were locked on the ink-soaked papers as though they were a grave. His breath hitched unevenly, shoulders curling inward, and when he finally spoke, it was barely more than a confession to the dark.

“Why is it that everything I touch withers into ruin?”