: The Quill Above
The sky had cracked.
From the Spiral Plain, a staircase of ink-black stone had begun to spiral into the heavens—each step etched with a sentence in a language no living being had ever spoken. It wasn't built. It had written itself into existence.
At its summit: the bleeding void in the shape of a quill.
It hovered, unmoving. A symbol of authorship. Of control. Of creation itself.
Chris stood at the foot of the stairway, jaw tight. "It's waiting."
Grey nodded, sword in hand. "Or daring us."
Kairo, eyes distant, whispered, "We climb, or we lose the world to a writer who never wanted an audience."
The first steps were easy.
The staircase bore no resistance. The air shimmered, but held. The wind, long dormant across the Spiral Plain, whispered around them—carrying half-formed phrases.
Regret.
Memory.
Mercy.
Each word followed them like a ghost.
But by the hundredth step, things began to change.
It started with Grey.
His blade, forged from discarded endings, began to grow heavier.
Each strike it had ever made echoed back at him with phantom screams—villains, soldiers, creatures he'd killed to survive.
He faltered.
Chris steadied him.
"You carry them," she said. "But they don't define you."
"They were necessary," Grey muttered, but his hands trembled.
From behind, Kairo whispered, "Necessary doesn't mean guiltless."
They walked on.
Chris was next.
At the three-hundredth step, her flame flickered—not from cold, but conflict.
From the air formed a younger version of herself, standing in front of her—barefoot, fireless, wide-eyed.
"You became something you said you'd never be," the echo whispered. "A hero who chose victory over people."
Chris stared into her own eyes.
"No," she said. "I chose survival."
The echo didn't respond. It merely dissolved into embers, and the embers into ash.
Chris did not cry.
But her next step was slower.
Kairo was spared illusions.
But not silence.
He began hearing the thoughts of every dead seer before him, trapped in a loop of unfulfilled visions.
"The quill always betrays the page."
"Creation without restraint becomes annihilation."
"Wale was our cage. But Avreth is our extinction."
Still, he climbed.
Each step was a prayer.
Each breath, a rebellion.
At step six-hundred, the staircase shifted.
What had been stairs turned into sentences, floating one by one through the void. They had to walk on language itself—each phrase vanishing beneath their feet as they stepped forward.
Chris gasped. "The stairs are dialogue."
"Not ours," Grey muttered. "These aren't from the past."
Kairo corrected him. "They're from what hasn't happened yet."
Predictions.
"I forgive you, Chris."
—Grey, Chapter 100.
"I knew I would betray you, Kairo."
—Chris, Chapter 248.
"Let me die, Grey."
—Kairo, Chapter 327.
They said nothing.
The words said too much.
But none of them stopped.
At step seven-hundred-fifty, the air stilled.
Ahead, a figure appeared—neither man nor monster, but something half-formed.
It wore robes made of revision marks.
Its face was a blur of drafts.
Its voice was seven different ones overlapping:
"You carry dead plots. You are corrupted arcs."
"Turn back. Let the new author build alone."
Chris summoned flame. "We are the new authors."
Grey raised his blade. "And we decide what gets cut."
Kairo stepped forward, eyes gleaming. "You are not the author."
He held out his hand—and spoke Wale's true name.
"You are the quill. Nothing more."
The figure shrieked, unraveling into punctuation marks—commas, slashes, red slashes of editorial wrath.
Then silence.
They climbed higher.
Step nine-hundred.
The wind vanished.
No sky above them.
No ground below.
Only one final page, suspended in the dark.
They stepped onto it.
It read:
"This is where the world ends."
Chris gritted her teeth. "Then we write a new world."
Kairo reached forward, placed his palm to the page.
And in his voice, all three of them spoke:
"Begin again."
A pulse of ink.
A tearing sound—like paper ripping through time.
And they were no longer climbing.
They were falling—
—into the eye of the quill.
And something was waiting inside.
Not a god.
Not a monster.
A writer.
Sitting at a desk made of bones and timelines.
No eyes. No mouth. Only a hand, endlessly scripting.
It did not look up.
But they knew its name.
Avreth.