Faded Page Novels & Stories

⸻ 🌙 The Lost Pages The book slowly opened. 📖 ⸻ Its pages fluttered wildly. ⸻ Most were empty. ⸻ Destroyed. ⸻ Gone forever. ⸻ Yet one page remained intact. ⸻ One final page. ⸻ One hidden page. ⸻ A page nobody had ever seen before. ⸻ The page that existed before Memory Zero. ⸻ 😨 ⸻ 🌙 Before The First Question The page glowed softly. ✨ ⸻

The crib was empty, and everything was gone. Even our wedding portrait had been taken down. The room held nothing of mine except the faint trace of my scent still lingering on the pillow. Every sign that I had ever existed in this house had been erased. I had been desperate enough to wipe away every last trace, to leave him with nothing to hold onto. Jasper slid down the side of the bed and crumpled onto the floor, clutching the pillow to his chest. His shoulders shook violently, and a single hot tear rolled down his face.

PURITY •••••••••• My finger brushes over that faded red dot for the umpteenth time, this very minute stain capturing my attention more than it should. The note is small and rectangular, torn from something bigger, with rough yet designated edges, like it was ripped with purpose. It has a certain brown shade to it, giving it an aged feel, but that only makes it perfect. That faded dot sits just beneath the last line, not quite a fingerprint, not quite a smear, only a dot. Dried and old. Once again, I tell myself it's just ink. Nothing more.

“...under the cold sun, there comes a fair lady falling from the sky. The maiden lay there basking under the heated sun, upon her arrival, the trees made way. A huge gust of wind came waving in arc, cutting everything it touches. The tree…” The words after that were faded by the multiple words it got mashed up in before this page. It probably got wet and the ink went through some of the pages. I flipped through the pages of the book gently, and all of the words were mashed up together with the words before the page just like the old yellowish paper I’m holding. I opened the other books, not minding the dust that flew in each book I opened. They had the same condition – faded, ink mashed up t

I instructed, my voice tight. I heard him move, the rustle as he turned the pages. “Here.” I reached out, my bleeding thumb finding the page. I pressed it against the ‘falcon’s grip’ paper, smearing a small, crimson blotch. For a moment, nothing happened. Then, a faint, coppery sizzle, like water on a hot stone. The blood seemed to be absorbed, sinking into the fibers of the paper. And where it had been, lines began to appear. Not ink, but a subtle change in the texture of the page itself, a raised, intricate pattern forming under my fingertips.

At our class reunion, my so-called best friend, Shannon Drew, pulled out a box stuffed with folded notes. A line was taped across the top— [Draw one of Mia Martinez's hopeless-romantic quotes.] The room burst out laughing. Someone pulled a love letter I'd written to Damien Byford senior year. "Damien smiled at me today. I want to give him all my tomorrows, too." Someone else grabbed one from college. "It's okay if he doesn't text back. He'll think of me when he's not busy." Damien had never replied to a single letter. I'd always figured he'd tossed them years ago. Then Shannon drew letter No. 99. Leaning against Damien, she laughed as she read, "If you ever decide you don't want m

Others redirected to blank pages or error screens. Then I saw it. A P*F. No thumbnail image. No description. just a plain title in small black text: *UNTOLD TRUTHS* I frowned. That alone should have made me close the laptop. It sounded dramatic. Fake. Like something written to scare people. But my cursor hovered. And then I clicked. The document opened slowly, page by page, as if it were heavy. The formatting was old-fashioned. No flashy fonts. no images on the first few pages. Just dense text, footnotes, reference, to things I didn’t know existed.

We both looked down at it like it had spoken out loud. Root: miss you already. Tell me your lecture was boring enough that you thought about me the whole time I read it twice. My heart fluttering at each word and my cheeks blushing. "Don't," Jennifer said, watching my thumb hover over the screen. "I'm not doing anything." "You're doing the thing where you say you're not doing anything right before you do the thing." I locked the phone and set it face-down, if only to prove her wrong, and lasted exactly eleven minutes before I picked my jacket up off the floor.

The clock struck midnight as the moon climbed to its zenith. I lay in bed, feeling my wolf spirit slipping away, piece by piece. It was a slow, receding tide, pulling all the life from me. “Aria! Hold on!” My mother’s voice sounded distant, though she gripped my hand tightly. “The healer is almost here!” I tried to answer, to reassure her, but no sound came out. My eyelids felt like lead, the world around me blurring and fading to gray.

He asked. Carys opened it and leafed through its pages. Once she had looked through every page of that book, she turned over to page 17. Alpha King and I leaned closer as she switched on the table lamp kept on the reading table and held up page 17 against the light. A circular pattern appeared like a watermark on the page, which was otherwise not visible under normal light.