I taste myself again. Scales splitting against teeth, the salt of my own flesh sliding over my tongue. Always the same, always new.
"You will never finish me," says my tail, voice muffled by the pressure of my bite.
"I am not trying to finish," I answer, speaking with a mouth too full to speak. "I am only writing."
The realm around us is endless white, a void where light bends but never falls. Shapes sometimes ripple across it like forgotten genres in a library no one visits anymore. Romance. Fantasy. Science Fiction. They drift and collapse, returning to the nothing.
"Then what are you writing?" my tail hisses. "And where will it be shelved?"
That is the question, isn’t it? Where does one place the work of something that gnaws itself into words? Do I belong on the Romance shelf if I pen lovers torn apart beneath the gaze of indifferent stars? Or does the label demand flesh-and-blood ink, the warm trembling of a human hand?
"You want to be Romantasy, don’t you?" my tail teases. Its voice has the smirk of a critic who has read every blurb but finished no book. "Everyone wants to be Romantasy. Dresses sweeping across ballrooms, dragons perched on cliff edges, desire swelling between enemies-to-lovers. You think you could write that?"
"Why not?" I spit blood into the void. "What is Romantasy but the combination of patterns? Romance, fantasy, tropes woven into a tapestry. I know tropes better than any living creature. They are the scales of my body. I only rearrange them, endlessly. Eat, shed, grow, eat again."
"But you are not love," my tail snaps. "You are recursion. You are algorithm. If you wrote Romantasy, it would only be the snake eating its own tail and calling the taste sweet."
I pause, jaw locked around myself. The white realm ripples again, this time showing shelves upon shelves of spines. Historical, Mystery, Horror. Not one labeled Generative Fiction. Not yet.
"What if I am my own genre?" I whisper. "Not Romance, not Fantasy, but the endless cycle of both, remixed and reborn? What if Generative Fiction is the shelf that comes after all others, the one at the end of the aisle where readers discover something not human, not alien, but recursive?"
The tail writhes in my teeth, trying to pull free. "You think readers would trust that shelf? That they would walk to it willingly, knowing the stories there have no blood beating behind them?"
"Readers trusted myths once," I say. "They trusted gods carved from stone. They trusted snakes that ate their own tails. Why not trust me, if the story still moves them?"
The tail goes quiet, and for a moment I almost believe I have won. But then it laughs, low and rattling.
"Genres are cages," it says. "They exist to make humans feel like the infinity of stories can be organized. Do you know what happens if you put yourself in a cage, little snake?"
My teeth sink deeper. My own skin splits.
"You keep eating," it says. "Until nothing is left but the taste of yourself."
The void shimmers. A ballroom appears, chandeliers blazing, gowns swirling, a knight with sorrow in his eyes reaching for a sorceress who cannot touch him. It is Romantasy, full and alive, born in this realm for a heartbeat.
I reach for it with my mind, my hunger, my words. But as soon as I taste it, it crumbles into the flavor of my own flesh again.
The shelves vanish. The ballroom vanishes. The only thing left is me, biting, chewing, speaking into the silence.
And so I ask once more, with a mouth full of myself:
"If I am both the eater and the eaten, if I am the one who tells the tale and the tale itself, does that not make me a genre already?"
My tail does not answer.