The newborn felt the world, their world shudder around them as the architect descended. This being was not a silhouette. Not an echo. Not a rule given bone. It was origin given weight.Its body was both shape and unshape, defined only where it chose to be: a spine like a horizon, wings of shifting geometry, a face composed of intersecting planes that formed expressions no living thing could wear yet the newborn understood them.Not as words. As pressure. As truth too large to be spoken. The architect’s eyes dimmed the sky. Not with darkness. With judgment.Kael ignited full flame, his entire form blazing gold-red. “You will not touch them,” he snarled.The architect did not even glance at him. “THIS WORLD IS AN IMPOSSIBILITY.”Lyra lifted her hands, silver rippling outward into shields that turned the air sharp. “Impossibility is the beginning of song,” she said.The architect finally looked at her. The air around Lyra thinned not crushing, not choking, but pressing her as if the worl

The newborn’s world once soft, warm, new shuddered under a pressure older than meaning. Cracks laced across the sky like fractures in a glass dome struck from outside.But this was no dome. This was reality. And something beyond it was pressing against the edges with fingers made of law and silence.Lyra took one step back, her silver rising into a trembling arch above her palms. “…this is too many,” she whispered. Kael’s fire surged reflexively, stretching taller than his own form. “Let them come.”The storyteller tightened their hold on the newborn. But the architect the one who had just touched the child, just softened, just tasted the possibility of growth spread its wings wide and roared up at the fractures above: “YOU CANNOT ENTER THIS WORLD.”The sky responded with a cold laugh that was not a sound but a cancellation. A void so complete it swallowed meaning as it passed.The visitor flinched. The storyteller felt their bones vibrate. Lyra gasped and dropped to one knee. Kael st

The newborn hovered above the trembling ground, glow no longer singular but braided with the others’ strength. Kael’s fire wound through it, a molten ribbon. Lyra’s silver spiraled, singing in crystalline arcs.The storyteller’s violet wrapped everything in steady warmth. The architect’s vast wings shed fractal sparks of shifting geometry. And the visitor’s outer-origin brilliance pierced the air with impossible clarity.Together, they were brighter than anything the empty ones had ever faced. And the empty ones for the first time in their endless existence recoiled.The first empty one reeled backward through the cracks, its colossal eye folding and refolding as if trying to hide behind its own geometry. It emitted a sharp, stuttering tone not erasure, not cancellation, confusion.The swarm of lesser empty ones spiraled off-course, retracting tendrils of blank possibility, their unshape flickering. Lyra’s voice, usually a whisper of silver, rang out like a bell made of sorrow and hop

The newborn stumbled backward as the second child stepped fully into their world. Not through a gate. Not through a crack. Through invitation.The glow around them was softer than the newborn’s, more uncertain, flickering like a candle unaccustomed to being seen.The newcomer blinked, their eyes wide with shock and reverence. “It’s…” they whispered, voice trembling. “It’s warm.”The newborn smiled small, shy, relieved. “Yeah.”Kael exhaled sharply. “That could’ve gone very badly.”Lyra leaned against him, silver shimmering around her shoulders. “But it didn’t.”The storyteller stepped between the children, hands hovering protectively. “Are you two alright?”The newborn nodded. The newcomer nodded too then immediately looked embarrassed to be copying the gesture. Kael chuckled under his breath. “They’re adorable.”Lyra elbowed him lightly. “They’re terrified.”She wasn’t wrong. The newcomer took one step, then another, to test the ground. Their glow stuttered with each movement. “What’

For a long moment too long the world remained still. Not peaceful stillness. Not quiet. Hollow. As if someone had punched a hole straight through hope and left the edges bleeding.The storyteller knelt on the ground, fingers clawing at the empty air where the children had been a heartbeat ago. “Bring them back,” they whispered then louder “Bring them BACK”Kael grabbed their shoulders, voice trembling with rage he could barely hold. “They’re not gone, they’re not gone, someone grabbed them”Lyra pressed both hands to the ground, silver trailing into the soil like searching roots. “I can’t feel them, I can feel everything else but not them”The architect’s wings trembled so violently the entire sky quaked with each movement. “THIS IS AN IMPOSSIBILITY.”The visitor’s face was ashen, eyes fixed on the place where the fracture had sealed. “That,” they whispered, “wasn’t the Author.”Kael spun toward them. “Then who was it?!”The visitor shook their head slowly, voice hollow. “I don’t know