The sky above the Realms was paper-thin.
And now it tore.
Somewhere beyond the Library, beyond the Threaded Realms, past even the Vaults of Time, quills dropped, scrolls curled, and narratives collapsed inward like dying stars.
The Redactors had stirred.
And they were not pleased.
Liora couldn't stop trembling.
The lines of golden script still flickered across Kael's skin, now etched with languages she couldn't read — not because they were foreign, but because they hadn't been invented yet.
"What… what did you do?" she asked.
Kael didn't answer. He was listening to something else.
No — someone else.
"The Index is opening," Kael murmured. "We broke the seal. They're coming."
"Who's coming?" Bran rasped.
He had collapsed after the shadow fled his body — left pale and shivering, pieces of memory slashed away like pages torn mid-sentence.
Kael looked at him. "The editors of reality. The ones who keep the stories in line."
In the corners of the room, the walls began to bleed margin notes.
Lines like veins, scrawled in crimson ink:
"Unauthorized narrative divergence."
"Reconstruction protocol pending."
"Redactor presence detected."
The girl of feathers pressed herself against the nearest stone pillar. "They're rewriting already," she whispered. "We need to run."
"No," Kael said. "Not this time."
He held up the page.
But it wasn't just a page anymore.
It had begun unfolding — growing. Spiraling into a map of realms that didn't exist until it declared them.
The Breath within him was altering causality with every beat of his heart.
"This page isn't from a book," he said. "It's from the first sentence ever written."
And that was when they heard it.
The sound of a paragraph being erased.
It echoed through the room.
A sound like chalk dragged across the void, followed by a sudden, terrible silence.
Then —
A figure stepped through.
It wore robes of blank parchment. Its face was smooth, expressionless, like a mask carved from compressed stories. Around its hands: a pair of scissors made from thought.
The Redactor.
One of them.
A being older than memory, older than genre. Sent to prune narratives. Sent to correct.
"I greet the breach," it intoned, voice layered with ancient echoes. "You are non-canonical."
Kael stepped forward. "I know who you are."
"Then you know what must occur."
"No," Kael said, raising the page. "I know what I will write next."
Time hesitated.
The Redactor moved like slicing wind — its scissors gleaming with intent.
But Kael was faster.
The Breath surged. Words twisted the air.
He shouted: "Let the footnotes rise!"
And suddenly, the Forgotten stepped forward.
Figures half-dreamed. Characters that had been erased too soon. A soldier who never got his ending. A child lost in the margins. A god who was redacted before ascension.
They surged from the page, screaming and radiant, rallying behind Kael.
"I write with the authority of the unwritten," he said.
And the Redactor faltered.
Bran stood shakily, eyes wide. "We can fight them?"
Liora stared in awe. "We can do more than that…"
Kael turned toward the others, eyes glowing with the gold of raw narrative.
"…We can rewrite the Realms."
And far above, beyond the torn veil of ink and stars…
The Archivist awoke.
The only being older than the Redactors.
It opened a single eye, the size of a moon, and muttered:
"The Last Quill has been chosen."