“I am telling you, Cillian, I just think we should rewrite it,” Jeremy said and rubbed his eyes. The old, battered laptop screen flickered as the internet threatened to go out, and Cillian bit back a screech of pure frustration.

“I worked on this for six months, Jeremy. We have already gone through four rewrites,” Cillian snapped as he tried his hardest not to cuss Jeremy out directly. “I don’t see what the problem is. I was promised to be given more creative control.”

“Well, that was then, Cillian. Frankly, the advertising metrics aren’t looking good. People are dissatisfied,” Jeremy explained patiently, like he was explaining a particularly difficult concept to a child. “It can’t be helped. People expect more from you.”

“I have played along for six years, Jer,” Cillian snapped and then took a deep, shaky breath. It wouldn’t do to cuss out his editor. “And they’ll hate read it, so that’s better, isn’t it?”

“You shouldn’t make metrics off of hate reads, Cillian. That’ll only last so long,” Jeremy shot back. “It’s better to make your readers happy.”

“I’m sorry, but if they’re mad about it, they can just die mad,” Cillian snarled and stood up from his creaking desk chair to run a hand through his hair. “Can we reschedule this call? I need to calm down.”

“No, we can’t, because if we do, you will just avoid me for the next six weeks, and we are on a deadline,” Jeremy said flatly, and Cillian’s eye twitched.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Everything was supposed to work out. It was supposed to work out. But, here he was, a starving artist in a tiny studio apartment, locked in here for hours upon hours out of a day to slam out chapter after chapter. He didn’t have enough savings to just take a hiatus. The webnovels wouldn’t survive if he just disappeared.

He was tired.

“Let’s compromise then,” Cillian said and turned back to the desk. “What are they mad about? I can tweak it a bit.”

‘Compromise’ curled around his tongue like a bitter poison, and he tried to swallow around that disappointment that was filling up his lungs. He was such a fucking coward.

“Everything,” Jeremy said flatly and there was a click from the other side of the screen as he presumably brought up another screen. “You’ve seen the comments. ‘Jethro looks like a bitch,’ ‘What is infinityscript even doing,’ ‘Wtf is this, Jethro seems like a crybaby,’ ‘Why don’t we get a sequel instead.’”

“They haven’t even read it, how the hell are they supposed to know what Jethro is like?” Cillian demanded, and Jeremy cleared his throat.

“Frankly, Cillian, they’re expecting a sequel of Decay. Or something equal to or just as powerful as Bard. They want a god killer, not a paladin making a bunch of friends and fighting for the people. Readers don’t like those kinds of stories now. They want mad men driven by self interest. Compassion is boring.”

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Compassion is… boring?

That was it?

Compassion is boring?

Then what the hell was the point of anything, exactly?

“There is nothing boring about compassion, Jeremy,” Cillian snapped. “If they want to read edgelords being lecherous hounds, there’s a million other webnovels and webcomics to read like that.”

“Cillian, you’re still under fire for not even including love interests or at least women swooning---”

“That is a misogynistic trope and---”

“Cillian, it’s about time you understood your target audience and stopped looking down on them,” Jeremy snapped, and Cillian froze. “This is the deal you made. Your target audience are not women in their twenties, or trans people. You agreed to write straight cis men. You agreed to write grimdark fantasy. You agreed to write male power fantasies. It’s a bit too late to back out on that now.”

This was… this was what he did, wasn’t it? It really was. Cillian’s mouth was completely dry at the realization. It had been a truth he had been railing against for years now. A crazy thought occurred to him. Maybe he should just out himself and lose all of his fans. Maybe he should destroy this himself. It would be so easy to do. He could wreck everything, and it wouldn’t take much longer for them to release him from his contract. Then, he could do what he wanted. He could build up a new audience somewhere else, find new fans, and then… and then it would all be fixed.

He could do it. It would only take a word from him, and it would be done. He could burn it all down, and then he could be free.

But what if he could never write again? Who would take him with his entire fanbase destroyed? Public support, if he even got it, would not be enough. Would he have to start from scratch, with free-to-read another site? Would he---

He couldn’t do it, he realized like a cold water bucket over his head. He couldn’t do it, and it wasn’t fair. There was no way he could lose all of this. Even in a shitty studio apartment, with faded, peeling posters on the wall, a desk with a broken leg, and a water heater that rattled when he ran the shower, he couldn’t…

He had worked too hard to lose all of this, and the realization made his eyes sting with tears. All he cared about was writing. If he had to go back to a regular job while he was trying to support himself, he knew his writing would drop off. It was almost impossible to write full time. He had done it before, but…

His eyes trailed over to the poster on the wall of Ryuven, his very first main character, the only one that was free-to-read. The blue-skinned elf stared back at him, and he wondered where things had gone so desperately wrong.

All he had wanted to do was write.

“You’re right,” he said, even though it killed him to do it. “I’ll just… I’ll rewrite it. Make him more edgy. Mysterious. Not…”

Not a fresh breath of spring wind in the fucking hell Cillian had been drowning in. Not the quiet, optimistic paladin that believed in kindness and compassion above all else. Something more mercantile, more rough, more awful.

“Maybe I’ll make him an oathbreaker,” he said, but his voice cracked again, and he turned away from the screen to wipe at his eyes. “They’d probably like tha---”

A high pitched whine cut him off, and he looked back at the camera with wide, panicked eyes. Was this place finally going to blow from that shitty gas line?

“Cillian? What’s wrong?” Jeremy asked, but he sounded far away, the microphone distorted. Cillian lifted one hand to watch in abject horror as it started to dissolve before his very eyes, turning into blocks of white and blue.

No.

No, no, no.

Anything but…

No.

“Cillian!” Jeremy shouted, and Cillian looked back at the camera with watery eyes as his arms began to flicker out of existence.

“Jere---”

His words were cut off, and the last thing that crossed his mind was ‘fuck’.