The wake of Manus's death had left Hollow City in a hush too profound to understand. The streets, which had once cracked with the pandemonium of infinite rewrites, now lay eerily quiet, as if the city itself was holding its breath. Under the blackened ruins of the Archive, the whispers of ancient magic vibrated, the dark strand that had tied Kaiza's history to the rewritten world slowly fraying.Soryn's bloody hand lay upon Kaiza's shoulder, her breath thick, but her eyes unyielding. There was no triumph in the atmosphere, only the whisper of restoration, as if the first gasp of fresh air after a long, choking storm.Kaiza faced her, his chest straining. His body was a collection of broken glass and ink, each segment of him drawn towards fatigue, but his head ran. The Manus was destroyed, but the truth, whatever was left of it, was still caught up in the net of memories that had been torn asunder.He looked out toward the looming cityscape, the once-daunting skyline now faded and batt

The darkness wailed like a maimed beast.Ash fell from a torn sky, every flake murmuring things no mortal lips should repeat. The survivors cowered within a circle of shattered scripture, salt, and terror. The fire had died hours before, but its heat lingered—a memory of the Script-Breaker's birth.Kaiza lay on his side, his body convulsing in silence. His blood whispered scripture now. Each drop hit the ground and crawled away, forming riddles that tried to rewrite the earth itself.Soryn kneeled beside him, her fingers trembling. “Kaiza, stay with me—don’t let him take your story.”But Kaiza’s eyes flickered, showing two truths.One was him—fractured, burning, bleeding.The other… was the other.Inside the Ink RealmKaiza stood in an endless white emptiness. But when he glanced upwards, he saw words rather than stars. Thousands of sentences written across the sky, swirling in muddled spirals. His body half-ink, half-skeleton, his fingers oozing punctuation.Then he saw him—the Scrip

Kaiza had forgotten what the warmth felt like on his skin.Not just the warmth of a midday sun, but human warmth, flesh meeting flesh, touch without fear, a presence that didn't vanish with the turning of a page.That evening, following the collapse of the Echo Margin, he didn't sleep. Couldn't. Not with the absence of ink still drying in his soul. He sat beyond the windmill of the village, where the wind was filled with wheat and firewood, and the sky overhead hushed with the quiet of stars that no longer rearranged themselves into arcane signs.He felt lost. Free, perhaps. But more lost than ever.And then… Soryn found him.She came barefoot in the moonlight, her hair wild from the wind, her eyes shadowed with half-remembered pain and half-revealed truths. A linen wrap clung to her frame, modest but not hiding the softness of her silhouette—the living contrast to the sharp, abstract world Kaiza had just slain.“I had a dream,” she said, kneeling beside him.He didn’t answer, but she