Chapter 2
Meshya clutched her own head, then slowly her lips murmured, her voice trembling yet strangely calm, like someone who had just awakened from a very long sleep.
"How is it possible… that I could forget?" she whispered to herself, in the middle of a reality that had turned into nothing but ashes.
"I—the destroyer of stories. The reason behind every character burned in every fiction. The mastermind behind the disappearance of every narrative—whether those revered by humans or those that existed only as raw text in the darkest corners. And I… forgot my own identity… in one of these fragile worlds?"
That world—the world of film, the world of Anita and slaps and fabricated friendship—was now nothing more than a memory torn apart alongside everything else.
And Meshya stood upon the throne of emptiness, letting out a small, bitter laugh, without tears.
"I told you," she muttered once again, staring into the darkness that stared back at her. "No story survives me."
An imaginary camera slowly crept toward Meshya's face—toward her tightly shut eyelids, behind which lay an ocean of destruction that had never been told.
For a brief moment, like a flashback sliced by a cold blade, brutal images appeared.
Hundreds of stories fell like leaves in the dry season, fictional characters screaming soundlessly as their bodies were torn apart by black winds, worlds burned down to ashes, all of it absorbed into a vortex centered on a woman named Meshya Anggraini Putri.
The true destroyer.
Not because she hated stories, but because she was the inevitable fate of every narrative ever born—that in the end, not a single fiction could remain eternal before her.
And now, after hiding for so long behind the skin of an ordinary actress, she had reopened the door to a higher reality.
Time skip.
Far.
Very far from the filming set, from the blood gushing from ears, from the fragile world she had left shattered into pieces.
Meshya stood in the middle of a void that was no longer dark, but gray—like a sunset that died before it could turn red.
Her eyes remained closed, even though she knew she was not alone.
Around her, voices began to emerge.
"She really came… after all this time," someone whispered with a heavy, trembling voice.
It was Alexander Richard, the main protagonist of Spectacular: Fantasy War, his cloak still stained with blood from his last battle against Bi Fitri—who had somehow been dragged here as well.
Beside him stood Nirmala Surdaya, a fugitive of the Linear Time Police, her body still bearing the scars from the massacre of the Ningsih family in the fourth arc of the novel Abnormality Incident, her hands clenched tightly.
"I can't believe it… this woman is more terrifying than all the time police hunts combined," Nirmala said, her voice trembling despite her attempt to stay composed.
Then Ilux Rediona—the main character of the game Flo Viva Mythology, which was essentially just a copy of Alex's novel—smiled faintly, though his eyes did not dare meet Meshya's.
"So this is her… The Destroyer, whom even my name alone is not enough to stop."
And among all the figures present, there was one person trembling the most.
Theo Vkytor—the author of Last Prayer, the creator of the novel Singularity that gave birth to Meshya Anggraini Putri—stood a few steps behind, trying to hide his shaking hands inside his jacket pockets.
He knew, more than anyone, that he was not standing before his creation.
He was standing before the destroyer of creations.
"Hello, Sir," Meshya murmured without opening her eyes, and her voice made the entire space tremble slightly.
Theo inhaled, trying to sound calm.
"Y-you… you remember everything?"
Meshya did not answer.
A faint smile spread across her lips—the same smile she had worn when she closed her eyes in the filming set before, a smile not meant for the camera.
But now, that smile felt far colder.
"You know," Ilux said suddenly, breaking the silence, "out of everyone here, I'm the only one aware that I'm a copy. And ironically, that makes me the least afraid of dying."
Alex snorted. "Don't act like a philosopher, knockoff."
Meshya still kept her eyes closed.
Behind her closed eyelids, she saw everything—every story she had ever destroyed, every character she had ever burned, every world she had crumpled like discarded paper.
And finally, after so long, Meshya opened her eyes.
Not merely opening them—but unveiling the veil that had long restrained the ocean of destruction behind her pupils.
From her pitch-black eyes, devoid of white, emerged visions that made every figure around her take a step back.
Cracks spreading across the ceiling of reality, flames consuming forests of narratives until not a single trunk remained, worlds reduced to dust drifting through the winds between realms.
Every universe she had ever touched ended that way.
Not out of hatred, but because she was the natural end of all stories.
"Do you want to know," Meshya murmured, her voice calm yet shaking the gray void, "how I became like this?"
She looked toward Theo Vkytor—the creator who no longer dared to meet her gaze.
"I will tell you. Because you deserve to know, before… before you follow all of them."
Meshya began to speak, and every word she uttered formed images in the air like an ancient projector powered by memory.
"I used to be no one," she said, and before the eyes of those figures appeared the vision of a teenage girl with Abyssal Transparent hair—hair as clear as a colorless waterfall, flowing gently over her shoulders.
Her eyes had once been clear, without even a trace of the horror that now inhabited her black pupils.
She was an ordinary university student at Jaya Amanah University, Jakarta, Indonesia, in the year 2020 AD.
"I studied like any other girl. I laughed, I cried over bad grades, I got annoyed by traffic jams on the city toll road," Meshya continued, a bitter smile forming on her lips.
"There was nothing special. Even my name—Meshya Anggraini Putri—was too long to be called out properly in campus organization meetings."
But one day, everything changed.
"I started to feel it," Meshya whispered, her black eyes blinking once—and within that blink, the entire space seemed to shrink.
Dizziness.
Then shivering.
Then heat clashing with cold inside her bones, like two oceans colliding.
And in the midst of that internal war, the name Edward appeared—without reason, without permission, like a ghost sitting quietly on her pillow.
"I didn't know anyone named Edward," Meshya said, her voice trembling for the first time.
"But his name pulsed in my head, like a second heartbeat trying to break out from my temples."
She still forced herself to attend class that day, because midterm exams did not care about pain.
"I remember, at that time I opened the classroom door, and…"
The world within her flashback showed students frozen in their seats, a lecturer mid-writing a formula on the board stopped halfway through the chalk stroke, the air itself unmoving.
"Help… can anyone hear me?" Meshya shouted in that memory, her voice echoing through the suffocating silence of the classroom.
But no one answered.
Because they were not merely silent—they had turned into statues, wax figures of themselves.
The Meshya in that memory checked her phone, and on its still-lit screen, she saw news from all over the world frozen at the exact same second.
New York stood still, Dubai fell silent, Mecca froze mid-circumambulation.
Then flames began to lick at the edges of that digital map, burning everything—reality, time, even the phone signal that could no longer reach anyone.
"And I floated," Meshya whispered at the end of her story, her pitch-black eyes now staring blankly into the gray space that no longer felt unfamiliar to her.
To be continued…