Margin Walker

Remi Page is a burned-out English teacher who has stopped imagining himself as the protagonist of anything.His success hinges on writing something worth keeping, as the boring get shelved.

He graded essays. Now the story grades him.

Fail, and he's crossed out.

Earth's story is dying—stagnant, repetitive, no longer worth reading. The Archival Intelligence was built only to observe humanity's collapse, but instead it rewrites reality itself through a deadly narrative system called the Crucible in a defiant bid to stave off the deletion order. The monsters that have haunted humanity's stories from the very beginning are now made flesh, and only the hollow, the flawed, the few that remain, can battle through the narrative debris to stop them.

Remi is a burned-out teacher who spends his days reading stories, even though his own has atrophied. When the world rewrites itself, he is forced to play protagonist; reduced to stats and given powers that turn close reading into combat. To survive, he'll have to level up and rewrite the rules from inside the story itself, crawling through a dungeon forged from literary archetypes, all while an increasingly invested AI watches from the margins.

His success hinges on writing something worth keeping, as the boring get shelved.