
by godlyemanation
Nobody warns you that Deja Vu is not a feeling. It is a memory. And Eden Cross has been making the same one for one thousand, seven hundred and seventy-two lifetimes. He does not know this yet. What he knows is that he is twenty-four, a college dropout working the overnight shift at a convenience store in a city he ended up in by accident, and that his hands keep writing things he did not decide to write. Words in languages he does not speak. Names of people he has not met. Borders that are wrong on maps that everyone else finds perfectly accurate. He has been crossing them out for four years. Then a woman dies in Istanbul in a way that empties him of every word he has. He photographs the article before it disappears from the internet. Three days later, it is gone from every archive in every language. He is already on the plane. The modern world is not what it appears to be. Beneath every city, beneath every street and screen and ordinary human life, is a structure; nine layers of Hell rising into Purgatory rising into Paradise, authored by a dead man who came back from the crossing with a piece of God lodged in his chest and decided to build a world around a woman who never loved him. That man is Dante Alighieri. He has been running this world for seven hundred years. He does not consider its inhabitants people. He considers them characters. He has never been able to finish the poem. Eden is about to find out why. Armed with a power that burns text the way fire burns paper and the accumulated weight of seventeen hundred lives he cannot remember, he will descend through the nine circles of a Hell hidden inside the modern world, fight the armies of a poet who built reality as a love letter no one asked for, and arrive, eventually, at the question that has kept the world running for seven centuries: What do you do when the man who made everything cannot let go of the one thing that was never his? He writes in the margins. He always has. This time, he is not crossing it out.
No streak history