The margins bled. They always had—but now the bleeding was slow, syrupy, unnervingly rhythmic. As though the world had found a heartbeat again, and that heartbeat pulsed through torn sentences and decaying metaphors. The stitched edges of reality no longer held neatly; instead, they frayed like threads at the cuff of a forgotten draft. The world wasn’t dying. It was… reconsidering itself.And in the center of that strange, shifting non-place walked Kael.Not the god. Not the mortal. Not the child nor the memory. But the fusion.Gold and grey spiraled in his irises like opposing galaxies caught in collision. His skin shimmered like something written and erased and rewritten. Where he walked, words bent around him—trees leaned to avoid narrative alignment, clouds hovered low as if eavesdropping on a story they couldn’t quite grasp.And he was silent.Not just silent in sound, but in presence. Where Kael walked, conversation fled. Wind forgot to howl. Footsteps muffled themselves. Selene

The door opened like a wound.It didn’t swing outward or inward—it simply peeled, like memory detaching from bone, like a truth slowly being admitted. As it parted, light spilled from within—not radiant, but revealing, the kind of light that doesn’t illuminate the world so much as strip it down to the shape of its making.Pamela was the first to move.Despite the warnings in her bones, despite the twitching of glyphs along the corridor walls as if trying to signal “do not enter,” she crossed the threshold with the cautious resolve of a historian walking into a page that should never have existed.Beyond the door was no room, no chamber, no vault.It was a loop.A recursive sphere of memory, repeating endlessly in all directions like an echo locked in glass. In the center of it—curled, flickering, radiant and trembling—was Kael, or rather, the moment Kael first knew himself.⸻It was not a moment of joy. Not triumph. Not even clarity.It was terror.There, at the primal origin of his s

The tear widened.Not like paper. Not like sky.It screamed open, as if reality itself had reached its breaking point and could no longer hold its seams together. The margins howled with it—bleeding chronology, bleeding memory.And from that wound came everything the world had once forgotten.Whole timelines—long buried, discarded, pruned from the Tree of Plot—came crashing through like collapsing wavefronts. The bleeding margins quaked, and Subtext warped like a glitching dream.One by one, the alternate realities fell into the world like glass shattering in reverse.A kingdom appeared on a hill that hadn’t existed a second before.An entire species blinked into life—then burned into ash.A river rewound into a volcano, erupting upward from the soil like it was angry to have ever cooled.A child, playing with chalk on a cobblestone path, blinked—then became an old man, screaming, weeping, grasping at memories of parents who had never existed.“This is wrong!” Selene cried. “It’s rewr

It began not with a word, but with an absence.The sky no longer held its shape. Colors bled out of the air like bruises healing in reverse. The manuscript—The Book That Shouldn’t Exist—now hovered several inches above the cracked earth, pages turning without wind, ink forming without hand.Pamela said nothing.She couldn’t.Because as the pages moved forward, faster and faster, the world obeyed. The story was writing ahead of reality.⸻Selene was the first to bleed.It was subtle at first—a sudden gasp, her hand flying to her side. Her tunic darkened with crimson.“What—” she began, staggering backward. “No one touched me.”Kael caught her, gold and grey eyes wide, panic burning in both tones.“There was no wound,” he said.But it was there.The blood was real. The pain hadn’t even arrived yet.Selene looked down, trembling. She knew this logic. This rhythm.She was bleeding from a paragraph she hadn’t walked into.“It’s writing us ahead,” Elias said, teeth clenched. “We’re living a

Kael stood in the heart of the margins, the silence of a thousand unwritten worlds echoing in his bones.The blade Riva had offered him gleamed under the fractured sky—not sharp with threat, but dense with possibility. Around him, his companions watched with clenched hearts and still lungs. Even the Reviser, that shifting storm of crossed-out names and abandoned threads, paused.All waited.He studied the blade for what felt like an eternity, his reflection fractured in its metal—a dozen Kaels staring back, eyes full of regrets, rebellions, and rhythms. One was the child in the library. Another was the poet-god. One held a quill. One held a flame. One held nothing at all.And then, with a motion that broke the breath of the world—Kael took the blade in both hands……and broke it in half.Metal screamed like a dying timeline. The sound echoed through the manuscript, the margins, and the air itself—splintering the silence with finality.Fragments rained down, sharp as punctuation, soft