The mist clung heavier now.
Even Nocthaven—ancient, unreadable, immune to fear—seemed to tense around the two figures that had just returned from the Bleed. The gaslamps lining the stone street bent faintly toward the ground, their glow flickering like candlelight in a dying breath.
The forbidden door was still open.
DarkSun stared at it, the ink in his veins pulsing. Not from fear. From warning. From something ancient stirring deep within his Sequence.
He turned his back on the door. Not out of carelessness, but strategy. Whatever had followed them through wasn't ready to reveal itself. And if he watched too long, it might not wait for the right moment to strike. He would choose the moment.
Elias stumbled beside him, coughing mist. The ink tendrils had left faint black veins trailing up his neck, like vines crawling toward thought.
"You... you pulled me out," Elias muttered. "I was gone, and then you—"
"I didn't do it for you," DarkSun cut in, eyes sharp. "You just happened to be in the way of something worse."
Elias looked hurt, but nodded. He understood. They both did. This wasn't about trust. This was about narrative survival.
A low groan came from the door behind them. Not wood. Not hinges. Something deeper. Something alive.
Elias flinched. "We have to close it."
DarkSun shook his head. "It's not a door anymore. Not really. It's a breach. A scar in the city's structure. Something rewrote the lock."
Elias paled. "Then it's open... for good?"
"No," DarkSun said, voice hardening. "Just long enough to let it out."
A silence followed that. He didn't have to explain what it was. Elias had seen it too. The Editor. The shears. The red ink that bled like narrative justice.
But that wasn't what DarkSun feared.
Not most.
---
They returned to the Atrament Library, or rather, what remained of it. The sigils above the archway were cracked. The shelves inside trembled. The tomes whispered louder than before, pages flipping of their own accord. The librarians—blindfolded as always—stood stiller than statues, heads slightly tilted toward the pair as they entered.
They knew.
"Seal this wing," DarkSun commanded, his voice echoing with unnatural weight. One of the blind librarians bowed without word, walking backward into the fog-thick archive.
Elias followed DarkSun into a sealed room behind the map archive—a chamber lit by floating orbs of dim inklight.
There, DarkSun placed the journal—the ash-black Codex Fragment—on the table, its cover twitching like it still breathed.
Elias eyed it warily. "You're going to use it again?"
"I have to," DarkSun replied, pulling off his gloves. The veins along his forearms shimmered with coiling inkmarks—runic, alive. "The Codex responded inside the Bleed. It bent for me. That means my Sequence is still in flux... I can push it further."
"But that place…" Elias swallowed. "It changed something in you."
DarkSun gave a humorless smile. "That's the idea."
He flipped the journal open. Pages turned without touch. It stopped on one: blank, but warm. Waiting.
DarkSun dipped his finger into a vial of red-black ink. Not ordinary ink—bleed-ink, drawn from the margin between stories. His finger hovered above the page.
Elias leaned in. "What are you writing?"
DarkSun whispered, not to Elias—but to the page:
> "Sequence Inscript: Umbra Verse, Layer Two."
The page convulsed. Symbols erupted across its surface like veins spiderwebbing through skin. The ink on DarkSun's arm answered, crawling up toward his throat, around his neck like a coiled serpent.
Pain flared.
He gritted his teeth.
In his mind, he saw something—no, someone—watching. Not from this world. Not even from the Bleed. A figure cloaked in static, holding a pen that wrote backward. The Reauthor.
Not yet. You're not ready yet.
The vision faded.
When the pain subsided, the ink marks on DarkSun's body had changed shape. The serpent had become an eye—open, lidless, always watching.
He had ascended.
Sequence Layer Two: Narrative Bonded.
Elias watched with awe. "You did it…"
But before he could speak further, the light in the room flickered.
Something was inside the Library.
Not walking. Not breathing. But present.
DarkSun stood, voice cold. "It came through."
They burst from the chamber into the library halls.
The air was thicker now. The shelves were trembling—books crying ink, leaking secrets. A figure drifted between the stacks. Not walking, not alive. A thing made of pure narrative residue—The Ink That Walks.
It had no face. No hands. Just flowing text unraveling from its form like scrolls in a hurricane. It whispered as it passed:
> "Once upon a never..."
"Characters unchained..."
"The plot consumes the host…"
Elias froze. "That wasn't there before."
"It wasn't supposed to exist," DarkSun said, eyes narrowing. "It's a leak. A conceptual wraith. Born from stories abandoned mid-sentence."
The creature turned toward them.
And screamed.
A thousand voices, all cut off mid-word. All erased. All desperate to be read again.
DarkSun didn't hesitate.
He raised the Codex Fragment. The book flared, glyphs forming around his hand.
"Back," he growled. "Back to the unwritten."
But the wraith didn't retreat. It lunged, dragging narrative threads behind it—each one a failed life. A dead ending. A forgotten name.
Elias shouted, drawing a blade of ink-forged steel from his coat. "We're rewriting this ending!"
Together, they struck.
Ink clashed against ink. Narrative screamed against will. And as the Codex pulsed in DarkSun's grip, one truth echoed above the chaos:
This was only the prologue.