The Realms blinked.
Reality faltered for a heartbeat as The Archivist exhaled — and somewhere in the ruins of a forgotten chronicle, ink turned to mist, and stars rearranged themselves into runes.
Kael dropped to one knee.
Liora grabbed his shoulder. "Kael—?"
His mouth moved, but the voice that came out wasn't his.
"I am Not Yet Written."
The sentence wasn't sound — it was truth, etched directly into the minds of everyone in the room. And with it came something else:
A pull.
Like gravity, but ancient. Older than time. As if something… someone… was reading them from the other side of the page.
The girl of feathers, Nyra, flinched.
"The Archivist," she whispered, her feathers bristling in fear. "It's watching. That's what it does. It sees all the threads. All versions. All mistakes."
Bran, pale and still flickering from the Redactor's corruption, stared up at the ceiling. "We shouldn't be here. We're trespassing inside its gaze."
The walls pulsed.
Words melted.
Names unspooled.
Every identity in the room began to loosen — as if the very concept of self was being proofread.
Kael's skin burned. The golden glyphs that once shimmered in whispers now glowed with judgment.
And then…
The Eye blinked.
It was like being erased and rewritten at once.
Liora fell to the ground, screaming as time bent inside her. She saw herself as a child, an old woman, a villain, a footnote — a hundred versions flickering in and out, rewritten mid-moment by an editor that had no mercy.
Kael gritted his teeth. "Stop it—!"
The Breath inside him surged.
The page — now a relic of the First Sentence — quivered in his grasp, resisting the Archivist's pull.
He screamed, not in pain, but in authorship.
"I will not be restructured!"
And then, the page retaliated.
Golden fire burst from it, forming shields of story, fragments of legend never told. One by one, they locked around the group — sentences woven into armor.
The Eye flinched.
A beat of silence.
And then — a voice, deeper than the void:
"Interesting."
The Archivist was now aware.
Not just of them — but of what Kael could become.
A Writer of Threads.
A Binder of Ends.
A Narrative Singular.
Suddenly, they were no longer in the chamber.
They stood atop a massive expanse of white — a plain made of unwritten pages, stretching endlessly.
Above them: a cracked quill the size of a tower.
And before them: a throne made of closed books, bound in chains of forgotten languages.
Liora looked around, stunned. "Where…?"
Bran's voice was hollow. "The Edge of Canon."
Kael stared at the throne.
He could feel it now — humming. Calling.
"This is where stories go to be judged," he said. "Where truths are chosen… and lies are exiled."
Nyra clutched her feathers. "Then we're here for a verdict."
Suddenly, a figure emerged from the empty pages.
Tall. Faceless. Clad in narrative threads. Its voice was calm, yet absolute.
"State your claim, Last Quill."
Kael stepped forward.
"I claim the right to write without chains."
"To tell the story not given, but earned."
"To defy the Redactors."
"To awaken the Forgotten."
"To unseal the Echoes."
"To remember the Realms."
The figure paused.
Then bowed.
"Then write."
And Kael, trembling, raised the page, quill burning in his hand.
Behind him, the others braced — for they knew:
The next line would change everything.