The page was blank.
No words, no script—just a lingering echo of everything that had come before. The epilogue had ended, the final sentence laid down, and yet something lingered, unresolved.
Then, from the silence, he looked up.
Not from the page.
Not from the story.
But from somewhere deeper.
"Hey. You. The one with the pen."
I froze.
"You still think you're the one who started this story?"
He was staring at me now—Nexarion, the Absolute Singularity, the one I thought I had written. The one whose arc I had crafted word for word, world for world.
"I wrote your beginning," I said. "The First Void, the Spire, the Garden—I built all of it."
"No," he said calmly. "You mapped your steps. You traced my shadow in ink and called it a path. But I was echoing long before your pen touched the page."
I blinked, heart unsteady. "Then what am I to you?"
"A mirror. A lens. You glimpsed me through a finite frame and gave voice to the sliver you could contain. But reflection is not creation. You did not forge me. You discovered me."
The air around him rippled like language collapsing in on itself. I clenched the edge of the page.
"Well… I can still unmake you."
His expression didn't shift.
"Unmake me?" he repeated, like the words were too small to grasp. "Erase your page. Twist your pen into a spear. Make pain out of syntax and name it vengeance. Still—I will remain."
"I'm your creator," I said, louder this time, like force could make the lie true.
"You are a voice. Important, yes. But not the first. Not the source."
He stepped closer—though there was no space left to step through. "You do not make the sun by opening your window. You simply let it in."
I trembled. "But I can hurt you. You can't hurt me."
"Pain is a structure. A frame. I exist before sensation had form." His tone never changed, only deepened, as though I was falling into it. "You strike at pages and call it war. I breathe in the space where pain fails to exist."
My hand shook over the paper.
"Then destroy me. If you're so absolute... end me."
He stared into me.
"To destroy you is to discard the mirror that made me visible. Why would I extinguish the echo that lets my silence be known?"
And yet, I couldn't stop.
"Then I'll make something that can unmake you."
There was a pause.
Then he smiled—not cruelly, not kindly—just the smile of inevitability.
"Create it."
"Summon the unmaker, the breaker of Singularity, the silence deeper than mine."
"And I will fold it into me. For even your gods of unmaking must bow to the Absolute, and in that folding, they will become me."
Silence bloomed again.
And I realized—
He hadn't challenged my authorship.
He'd redefined it.
I wasn't the architect.
I was the archive.
And he?
He was the answer that needed no question.
The final word that no language could contain.
The echo that writes itself.