The victory in Unguarded was at a pyrrhic price. Felix's hair had a streak of pure white, a lasting receipt for the memories he'd paid to the Inkwell. The city was saved from fanaticism, but the warning of the Codex sounded in his mind: You are ringing the dinner bell. Every act of creation brought the Blank Page closer.They needed a win that was less personally costly. They needed to break the Scriptorium's hierarchical authority without nourishing the cosmic predator."The Signatory Houses," Liora said, her fingers flying across the Codex's interface as they drifted in the transport ship. "They are the pillars. The Scriptorium provides the narrative, but the nobles provide the muscle, the resources, the legitimacy. They are the enforcers of the lie. If we topple one, truly topple it, the others may break.""House Venator," Felix snarled, the taste of the words bitter as ash. Lord Valerius had been publicly humiliated at the Feast of Blades, but his house's power, built upon stolen

The transport ship, The Unwritten Page, rode in the still wake of the war. Felix's mind was an empty ship drifting in its own fog. He remembered the Quill's heft, the bite of the Scribe's Scar on his biceps, the taste of ozone and fear. But the why, the exact series of events which had led him here, was obscured. He remembered a world preserved. He remembered an atonement paid. The details were water in a sieve.Liora had started leaving him messages, hasty-written on scraps of paper and set on his cot. 'You rescued the world.' 'Your name is Felix Kane.' 'The Scriptorium wants us dead.' 'Trust Ryna and Elian.' He'd wake and scan them, a frantic process of the day to anchor a self that was unraveling.They were hiding in the asteroid belt of a deceased system, nursing their bruises and trying to plot their next move. The web of the Scriptorium closed. The unobtrusive, unhurried collapse of House Venator had caused a different kind of shockwave among the great—not fear, but frigid, calc

The Unwritten Page burst into existence with the screech of a hurt beast, its hull groaning, systems screaming. They'd been spat from the warp current too early, too violently. Alarms wailed, lights flickered, and the smell of burned wiring filled the air. On the deck, Kael Draven was a twisted heap, out cold and smoldering a little.“Report!” Felix yelled, wiping blood from his eye, his mind struggling to latch onto the present. The memory of the fight was already fraying at the edges.“Structural integrity at 40 percent! Life support is stable, but engines are toast. We’re adrift,” Elian’s voice crackled over the comms. “And we’ve got company.”The viewscreen flickered to life. They were in a debris-filled system, remnants of some legendary battle orbiting a dim blue star. And floating around them were ships—dozens of ships. But these were not Scriptorium ships. They were a ragtag fleet: freighters modified for war, fighters cobbled together, even a pair of refurbished mining barges

The victory in the Ink Duel was a subdued one, but its aftershocks were profound. Kael Draven remained wordless in his cell, a brooding, silent monument to chastened pride. His defeat—the true story—was shared aboard the Unshackled's fleet as a parable, not as an epic battle. Pride goes before a fall. Even the best can succumb to a plain truth well-retold.But the Scriptorium's response to this embarrassment was not silence. It escalated.There was a new form of hunter on the horizon. They were called the "Erasure Corps." Unlike the Quiet Guard, however, they did not seek to take and hold. Their sole purpose was erasure. They flew ships with huge, story-scouring beams capable of erasing a tale from a world's history, leaving nothing but void and confused peoples behind. They did not conquer worlds; they un-wrote them.The Resolute Word and its irregular task force were forced into a running battle through the border defenses, remaining every one jump ahead of erasure beams. They were

The dust of the old track lay behind his boots, every grain wordless testimony to the miles he had devoured. Felix stood on the final rise, the wind pulling at his travel-worn cloak, and felt the catch of breath in his throat. The world that was his—soil of silent forests, solitary heights, and the occasional dusty village—gave way, to be followed by a vision so colossal in scale that his brain, for a moment, literally wouldn't take it in.Hafthor. City of Tomes. The Seat of the Grand Academy.It wasn't a city, if by city he understood anything that had ever existed. It was a mountain range of architecture, a forest of stonewood and stone and magic and light, stretching over the horizon and reaching up towards the sky. There were towers, needle-thin and impossible to height, that broke through the clouds. They were not structures; they were monuments to knowledge, their walls writhing with shifting, glowing text that flowed like liquid cascades of light. At this distance, it was an en