The Architect was gone. The Ending Itself had retreated. The Archive, once governed by structure and silence, now surged with voices. Each one writing. Each one believing. Each one true.And the Archive, for the first time in its ageless history began to fracture. The split quills, six in all, had given power to the Reclaimers. Ilien wrote justice wrapped in fire.Calla scripted valor into every blade swing. Mira penned beauty and ache and healing. Codex logged new laws that bent logic but honored truth. Anomaly juggled chaos and possibility.Even Alan, the original bearer, wrote only when necessary. But others, eager, untrained, burning with voice, began writing over each other.It started small: A tavern where three backstories claimed origin, A mountain that changed size depending on who was describing it, A hero who died, lived, died again, all within a paragraph.The Archive groaned. Branches shimmered, twisted, looped. Codex called it: “Narrative Overload. We’re all storytellers

The halls of Eidowen no longer whispered. They chanted.Alan walked them like a ghost trailing echoes of himself. Every line etched on the ivory walls dripped with familiarity. Not because he remembered writing them, but because they remembered him.Behind him, Calla and Ilien followed in silence. Even the bold Mira seemed subdued, her eyes tracing the sprawling narrative carvings that lined every pillar, stair, and stone.At the heart of the city, the Phantom Pen waited. But it wasn't just waiting, it was writing. The trio stepped into the central sanctum of Eidowen: a vast domed cathedral lined with broken quills and petrified ink.At its center stood an obsidian mirror, six feet tall, rippling like water trapped in a frame. Words floated across its surface in real time. Calla hissed, “That’s the Archive’s current draft.”Ilien stepped closer. “No, it’s a rewrite.”And the author? Alan.From the far side of the mirror stepped the Phantom Pen. His robes shimmered like ink under moonl

For one heartbeat, the Archive stood frozen. No wind. No breath. No thought. Even the sun, that stubborn narrator of time, dimmed like a forgotten sentence. The word “Redraft” rippled across existence. And then, reality fractured.From the seams of the Archive, two versions began to emerge. One shimmered with familiar warmth, the world as it was, the flame-scorched battlefield, Calla’s trembling form, Mira’s defiant tears, Codex’s flickering light. The other?The Author’s Redraft. Perfect lines. Clean arcs. No anomalies. No rebellion. It was lifeless. And yet, it was overtaking everything.Alan’s companions began to glitch. Calla looked down at her sword, now reformed into a ceremonial dagger. “What… is this?” Her voice was flatter.Mira looked at her hands. The scars from the Soulfire Trial were gone. “I don’t remember… why I’m angry.”Codex panicked. “They’re being overwritten! Their prior selves are being erased and replaced with idealized variants.”Ilien screamed as his laughter

The beam of null-ink ripped through the sky like divine lightning, Alan tackled Proto-Alan out of the way, shielding the fragile boy with his own body as the blast hit the ground behind them and unwrote the land itself. Trees blinked out of existence. Stones became blank spaces.Even the concept of time stuttered. Yet the name, the one carved into the cracked ground, remained. Alan had seen it. He couldn’t remember it. But he had felt it, and his soul now shivered beneath its weight.Calla pulled him up. “Alan! Are you alright?!”Alan staggered, blinking rapidly. “I… I saw everything. But it’s gone.”Mira crouched near the carved name, reaching for it, but her fingers passed through the letters like smoke.“It’s receding,” she said. “He’s trying to delete even the memory of it.”Proto-Alan was trembling. “He’ll find us. He’ll come himself.”Codex, now a pulsating prism of fragmented knowledge, whispered, “The True Author is rewriting Volume Zero as we speak. If we stay too long, we’ll

The silence after the shattering of the crystal was unlike any silence the world had ever known. It was not emptiness, it was suffocation,the weight of a thousand unspoken laments pressing upon every soul across the continents. Where once the pulse of Alan Smith’s existence threaded the veins of creation, there was now… nothing.The world trembled. Not from earthquakes, nor storms, nor celestial cataclysm, but from the raw absence of a presence so deeply woven into the tapestry of fate that reality itself staggered to find balance without it.In the Sacred Citadel, where moments before Alan had stood at the center of converging destinies, the place was barren. Only fragments of broken light hovered in the air like shards of forgotten memory.His companions, Mira, Kael, Seraphine, and Darius, stood motionless, their eyes wide, their mouths half-open as though frozen mid-breath.It was Seraphine who moved first. She stumbled forward, reaching toward the space where Alan had been, her h