William had gotten hooked too young.
The first time it happened, he was eleven. A spiral-bound notebook. A pencil worn to a nub. He wrote a story about a dog that could talk but chose not to because everything it wanted to say would make people cry. His mother read it at the kitchen table while he stood behind her, hands balled in his pockets.
She turned the last page and said it was nice.
Nice.
That should have been the warning.
Still, he didn't turn back.
Most people quit. William kept filling pages.
At first it was once a week. Saturday mornings. William would sit cross-legged on his bed and fill pages until his hand cramped into a claw.
Then it was every day.
Then it was every hour he wasn't doing something else, and most of the hours he was. Writing in his head during algebra. Constructing dialogue while the other kids played basketball. Revising sentences on the bus, lips moving, the woman in the next seat shifting away from him as though the muttering might be catching.
By twenty, he had three notebooks full of a novel no one had asked for. By twenty-five, he had two completed manuscripts, forty-seven rejection letters, a studio apartment, and a checking account that spent most of its time in the single digits.
Putting words on a screen was his passion and his vice.
The trouble with passion was that it didn't pay rent. The trouble with vice was that it cost too much, in too many ways.
William turned thirty in a laundromat because his apartment's water heater had died and the laundromat was warm. He ate a gas-station cupcake with a birthday candle he'd stolen from a dollar store.
He made a wish.
The candle went out.
Jobs fled him. The bookstore reduced his hours until they reached zero. The copy shop closed. The tutoring service lost its funding. The data-entry position hired him for three weeks, then the company relocated to Austin.
Thirty years old, and at any moment he was going to end up facedown in a gutter clutching a stack of manuscript pages, pockets full of lint and rejection. He could see it with the clarity of prophecy.
But he was always one step away.
That was the cruelest part. The almost. The nearly. The so-goddamn-close-he-could-taste-the-ink-on-the-contract.
Just a little more.
Just a little more.
The next one would get there.
The first novel had almost put food on the table. The second novel almost paid the bills.
The third one would save his life.
He had poured years into it. Years of four A.M. writing sessions, of skipping meals, of reading his sentences aloud in the shower until the neighbors pounded on the wall. He had rewritten the opening eleven times and cut forty thousand words.
It was good.
William sat at his desk. The monitor's glow carved his face out of the dark apartment. His beard had gone ragged. Three days, maybe four, since the last time he'd dragged a razor across it. His eyes were too swollen and too dry from the revision to care what grew on the rest of him.
His hand rested on the mouse.
The cursor hovered over the button.
PUBLISH.
This was his greatest fear. The rejection. The public's voice saying you wrote shit.
You are shit.
William clicked.
The screen changed. A progress bar filled. A confirmation appeared.
YOUR WORK HAS BEEN PUBLISHED.
He closed his eyes.
It felt like seconds. The darkness behind his lids was warm, and when he opened them again the light through the window had gone amber.
Six hours.
He had slept six hours in his desk chair with his face pointed at the ceiling and his mouth open.
His back popped in three places when he sat forward.
This was it.
Maybe he had done it. This was his turn. He had learned from every rejection, every comment, every review that took his work apart. He had studied craft. He had studied the market. He had bled into the prose and then cleaned up the blood so no one could see it.
He clicked REFRESH.
Nothing.
REFRESH.
Nothing.
REFRESH.
One review.
His breath stopped.
Four stars. The text was short. "Compelling. Rough in places but pulls you forward."
Four.
His eyes burned. He pressed the heels of his palms against them until colors bloomed. One review became two, two became ten, ten became momentum, and momentum was the only currency that mattered in publishing.
He opened the forum.
The forum was a reef of anonymous voices. Writers, readers, critics, trolls.
The forum had eyes. Thousands of them. Maybe the eyes he needed.
It cost nothing.
He typed a short post. Title, link, brief description. No begging. No false modesty. Just the book and an invitation to read it.
He clicked SUBMIT.
He turned off the monitor.
He went to the bathroom, pissed, washed his hands. Only then he went back to his desk and turned on the monitor.
Dozens of comments.
His stomach seized.
He scrolled.
User_GrimReads: What the fuck is this? Look at this prose. Garbage.
MODERATOR_ELLIOT: This smells like AI.
User_TrashCompactor: He uses em dashes. Obviously AI-generated.
User_SyntaxError: This word he used in chapter three? Dead giveaway. AI.
User_BookHound: Give it a 1. AI trash.
User_PageRipper: I wish people would stop publishing AI slop.
User_ColdTake: Reported. AI content shouldn't be on this platform.
User_VoidReader: 1 star. Didn't read past the first page. AI.
User_LitCritic99: The sentence structure is too clean. No human writes like this. AI confirmed.
User_NoFilter: Another AI hack trying to scam readers. Pathetic.
AI. AI. AI.
The word repeated like a hammer driving a nail through the base of his skull.
He scrolled faster.
One star. One star. Two stars. One star.
Reported. Reported. Reported.
He had written every word. Three years of his life compressed into a file that strangers were now dissecting with the gleeful cruelty of children who had found something and pinned it to the sidewalk to watch it die.
His hands shook.
He scrolled back to the top. Read the comments again. Slower this time. Looking for the one voice that would say it.
It's real. I'm real.
His gaze drifted.
The cord.
The computer's power cord ran from the back of the tower, across the floor, and up to the outlet near the ceiling. It was thick. Rubber-coated.
He looked at the ceiling fan.
It was old. Brass fixtures gone green.
It would hold.
William stood.
He unplugged the cord and climbed onto the desk. The wood creaked. He looped the cord over the fan's central rod, pulled it taut, and tied the noose. The rubber was stiff, and his hands were shaking badly enough that the loops came out uneven.
He stepped onto the chair.
He placed the loop over his head.
The rubber pressed against his Adam's apple.
He looked at the monitor.
The forum page glowed.
William stepped off the chair.
The cord pulled tight.
His body dropped, and stopped.
The noose didn't snap. He floated.
His feet dangled three inches above the floor. The cord hung loose around his neck.
The apartment lights went out.
The monitor died.
The dark lasted a blink. Then light returned.
Pink light.
It rose from the floor in a soft pulse, the color of cherry blossoms.
Something appeared in front of him.
It was small. Perhaps ten inches tall. It floated at his eye level, suspended in the pink glow.
Its body was round and soft, covered in fine fur the color of rose quartz. Two large eyes dominated its face, each one a deep magenta with pupils shaped like four-pointed stars. Small triangular ears perked upward from the top of its head. A tiny tail curled behind it, tipped with a heart-shaped tuft that pulsed with its own faint luminescence.
It blinked.
"Hello," it said. "I am Bonbon."
Its voice was high, clear, and gentle.
William opened his mouth. No sound came out.
The creature tilted its head.
"You have been chosen," Bonbon said. "Your heart is pure."
"Ch-chosen," William managed to say.
"The Earth is in danger," the creature said. Its star-shaped pupils widened. "Beings of darkness have infiltrated your world. They hide among you. They corrupt. They destroy peace and friendship wherever they take root."
It drifted closer.
"I have searched for a champion. Someone whose heart has not been broken by cruelty. Someone who still believes, despite everything, that beauty matters. That words matter. That the things we create with our hands and our pain deserve to exist."
The creature pressed one tiny paw against William's chest.
"I found you," it said.
William sobbed. His body shook. Snot ran over his upper lip.
His break had arrived.
"Will you help me?" the creature asked. "Will you protect the innocent? Will you fight the darkness?"
"Y-yes. I'll help."
The creature smiled.
The light entered William.
It passed through his skin without resistance. It filled his veins, his bones, his lungs.
Pink ribbons erupted from his body.
They wrapped around his arms, his legs, his torso. His clothes dissolved. The ribbons replaced them. They hardened into fabric. Boots climbed to his knees. Trousers tightened across his thighs. A short coat closed over his ribs, tails spilling behind him like a cape. A high collar locked at his throat with a slim ribbon. Silver buttons ran down the front.
White gloves sheathed his hands. The index and middle fingers of his right glove split open at the second knuckle, leaving the fingertips bare.
His hair changed.
The dark, unwashed strands lifted from his scalp and swept back from his forehead in a sculpted wave. The color bled out of them, becoming vivid pink. The same pink as the creature. The same pink as the heart that appeared on his left cheek.
The noose fell away from his neck.
The cord dropped to the floor.
William landed on his feet.
He looked at the mirror on the back of the bathroom door.
A stranger looked back.
Beautiful, lean, high cheekbones. A narrow mouth locked in faint amusement. Heart-shaped lenses materialized over his eyes, tinting the world rose.
The creature floated beside his shoulder.
"The first one is close, William. Can you feel it?"
"Yes. I can feel it," he said.
His voice had changed. The tremor was gone. The crack was gone.
"Then go," the creature said. "Protect the innocent. Punish the wicked. Restore what has been corrupted."
William walked toward the door.
He opened it.
Pink light spilled into the hallway.
The city looked different through heart-shaped lenses.
Three blocks behind him, the second monster was cooling in a dumpster.
That one had been easy.
Now he was walking toward the third.
"Which way?" William asked.
"He is on the fourth floor, William. Apartment 4C."