The ruins of the Chamber of Pages still smoked behind them, but the horizon offered no reprieve. A vast plain stretched forward, silver and endless under a sky streaked with black veins of lightning. The ground itself seemed to hum, pulsing like veins of a living being.Victor carried The Unseen Passage tightly against his chest, but something was wrong. The book quivered, faint vibrations rattling through its spine. Then, without warning, it opened in his hands.The pages wrote themselves. Not in gold, nor crimson, but in an ink so dark it seemed to bleed shadows into the air.Sarah leaned in, her breath catching as words scrawled across the parchment in jagged strokes:"The travelers step onto the silver plain. The first will fall before the storm. The second will scream before the dusk. The third will be left to walk alone."Lena’s face went pale. “It’s writing us. Writing ahead of us.”Victor’s throat tightened. “Then it means to trap us—not in the past, not in the present, but in

The morning broke with a red sun, swollen and heavy above the tree line. It hung there like an omen, staining the forest in bloodlight.Victor felt it immediately—the compass on his wrist hummed, not with direction, but with a new, icy dread. The book, pressed inside his satchel, pulsed like a second heartbeat.Sarah walked a few steps ahead, her shoulders stiff, her dagger strapped tightly across her chest. Lena lingered behind, eyes sharp and restless. Neither trusted the other anymore, though neither dared to say it aloud.Victor’s voice cracked the silence. “We keep moving. We don’t stop until the valley breaks.”Sarah didn’t look back. “And if the book makes its choice before then?”Lena’s laugh was bitter. “Then at least we’ll know.”They reached a clearing before noon, a wide space where the ground was covered in ash, black and brittle. In the center stood a stone altar, ancient and cracked, its surface carved with spiral patterns that seemed to writhe when stared at too long.

The altar crumbled into ash, and silence devoured the clearing. The book hovered above the wreckage, its spine glowing like molten iron. Victor staggered forward, clutching his wrist, the compass brand now fused into his skin like an open wound.“Victor—don’t move!” Sarah cried, reaching for him. But it was too late.The book snapped open in midair. Pages flared outward, wrapping Victor in a storm of words and shadows. They spun around him, cutting his skin with slivers of ink. The air hummed with a sound like a thousand quills scratching parchment.Victor gasped, but his voice was swallowed as the words crawled across his body. They weren’t just on him—they were entering him. Sentences inked themselves into his veins, paragraphs burned onto his arms, whole stories stitched themselves into his heart.Lena swore under her breath, blade raised, but she didn’t strike. She couldn’t. She’d fought monsters, shadows, and Elias himself, but this—this was something deeper. A rewriting of a sou

The storm of ink exploded outward in a blinding pulse, tearing through the clearing. Shadows howled, pages scattered like brittle leaves, and the air itself seemed to split between a deafening silence and a low, guttural thunder.When it cleared, Sarah found herself on her knees, trembling, her hands still pressed to Victor’s chest. His body lay still beneath her touch, the compass on his wrist glowing faintly, then dimming, then glowing again.“Victor?” she whispered, her voice breaking.Slowly, agonizingly, his eyes opened. One was the warm brown she knew. The other… pure ink, black and glistening, swirling with sentences that formed and dissolved in endless loops.Sarah gasped, relief and terror colliding in her chest. “You’re here. You’re with me.”Victor smiled faintly, his lips cracked. His voice came out in two distinct tones, one human and familiar, the other a low, unsettling whisper layered over it. “With you… always.”But when he sat up, the ground darkened beneath him, lin

The silence of the valley lingered like a bruise. Victor, Sarah, and Lena stood at its heart, surrounded by torn pages and whispers that had not fully died. Though the faceless figure was gone, its warning still echoed: You cannot carry both love and legacy…But the compass flared hotter than ever, pulsing with a restless light. Victor rubbed his wrist as if to cool it, though the brand only burned brighter.Then Sarah’s voice cut through the stillness. “Victor… look.”He lifted his gaze. Beyond the jagged rim of the valley, where the sky met the far horizon, the shadow moved again—vast, serpentine, gliding like ink spilled across the clouds. Its body coiled in impossible lengths, threading through the air as if the heavens themselves were its sea. Each ripple of its form bent light, darkening the sun for a heartbeat at a time.Victor’s chest tightened. “What is that?”Lena’s voice was low, almost reverent. “The Archivist called it once—the Serpent of Horizons. Not a beast of flesh, b