The six weeks expire. He calls Hale directly.

Hale answers on the second ring with the ease of a man who expected this call. "When can you start?"

He starts on a Monday.

The elevator doors slide open to a hum of keyboards and the sharp, citrus bite of cleaning products. Caden adjusts the strap of his laptop bag — too loose now, the leather sagging where his shoulder has narrowed — and follows Hale past rows of identical standing desks. Faces glance up, then away. A few hands pause mid-keystroke.

Torn from his own world and stuffed into the body of a villainess, facing the end of a doomed route he himself wrote, "Amelia" must navigate a world she really should know - too bad she was never great at worldbuilding.

Stuck in a world she (maybe) created, Amelia quickly finds that reality has filled in the details she failed to describe. The characters who were so flat when she wrote them now have nuance, and motives. The kingdom she wrote into existence is experiencing internal strife she never even thought about. And let's not even get into the complexities of the magic system, or the demon that forced her into this situation to begin with...

Oh, and then there's the fact that she's about to be arrested and executed... but surely she can come up with a way to write herself out of that, right?

...Right?

After a man is stabbed in the back and dies, he wakes up in the Labyrinth with a new body, new power, and another chance.

This story takes place in the same universe as my story Invoker.

The Dead Pixel Society

© 2026 Zoë Taylor

He barreled through the extremely heavy door without a second thought.

Atticus Carver, the star wide receiver, a popular sophomore in a high school in Louisiana, is about to get a change to his life he doesn't expect or want - and it's all in public.

Now the person who changed him to her, in spite of feeling terrible for what they did to an innocent young life and potentially more, wants one-hundred-million dollars wired to multiple bank accounts within a month, or they'll set the gender-bending spores on D.C.

Atticus is left reeling from everything, having to pick a new name for herself, learn to be a girl in high school, to finding new romances, to keeping her old friends and finding new ones, to picking up a brand-new sport for herself...and making enemies that she has no idea how to deal with...

I will also be posting this story on RoyalRoad.com and ScribbleHub.com.

The character in my dreams was not as common as Nancy or Victoria, but I was still quite familiar with her. Mona was a witch, a sorceress, whatever. A woman who did magic using a magic wand.

Chapter 8: At the Threshold

Morning arrived softly at the Temple of Aphrodite.

Hood up. Hair bundled underneath it, more or less contained. The sweatshirt is the largest I own and it reaches mid-thigh and in the elevator to the lab I stand with my face down and the hood forward.

I get to my desk before anyone else. This was the plan.

I open the overnight logs and they are good — rabbit's margins holding, pathway data clean, projection unchanged — and I focus on this and not on the fact that I am sitting in a laboratory in November in sandals and a hoodie like someone who has not quite finished becoming a person.

Good morning.

"Morning."

One

This time, Samantha announced her arrival by knocking on the door after she opened it. “Good morning, Sandy. Did you sleep well?” She bent down to pick something up from the carpet. “How did this thing get here?”

Sandy looked at her through bleary eyes. He felt drained, and his body ached as if he had the flu.

“How did what thing get where?” he croaked.

She held up a large black feather. “I think it’s from one of those rooks from around here,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “Nasty birds.”

His job was simple enough.

Across the Sea -2-
by Suzan Donamas