The Spindle had stopped spinning.
The tower, once a storm of living maps and spiraling glyphs, now stood eerily still. No pulse. No glow. Just silence, as if the act of being rewritten had drained it of definition.
Elian sat alone at the edge of a fractured platform. Beneath him stretched nothing — not black, not white — just absence. A non-place.
The glyph he'd used — Unwritten Tomorrow — still echoed through his Codex. Its page was blank now. Not burned, not torn. Perfectly blank. And somehow, that frightened him more.
He stared at it.
A page that could become anything…
…or nothing.
---
Quill had said nothing since the battle.
He stood several feet away, silent, staring into a wall where no maps remained. His fingers twitched now and then — as if sketching lines he couldn't see.
"You alright?" Elian asked.
No response.
"Quill?"
The man finally turned. His eyes were bloodshot. His Codex hung loosely from his side like a dead limb.
"Something followed us," he said.
Elian frowned. "What?"
"When you used that glyph. You didn't just erase. You created potential."
"So?"
"So something noticed."
---
A sound rose in the hollow of the tower.
At first, it was like wind through torn paper.
Then… whispering.
Dozens of voices. But not saying anything.
Repeating. Copying.
> Elian. Vale. Elian. Vale. Elian…
From the dark far end of the Spindle, something crawled.
Not walked. Not glided.
Crawled — as if trying to drag itself out of the void that shouldn't be.
Elian stood, Codex open. "That's not a Reaper."
"No," Quill said, backing up. "It's worse."
---
Out of the gloom emerged a thing made of discarded maps.
Its body was stitched from scraps that had been unwritten — fragments of places that no longer existed. Its limbs were long, too long, made of re-glued pieces. Its face was a collage of names, none its own.
Quill whispered its name:
> "A Ragman."
Elian's gut twisted.
He'd heard legends. Rare failures of remapping — when a glyph erases too much, and the residual potential gathers into form. Not alive. Not dead.
Just leftover.
Ragmen weren't hostile like Reapers. They didn't enforce laws.
They collected what was lost.
---
It tilted its head. A map fragment slid from its shoulder.
It spoke, but the voice was layered — multiple voices, multiple memories.
> "You used a future you hadn't paid for."
Elian narrowed his eyes. "I created a possibility."
> "You drew without sacrifice."
Quill stepped in front of him, stylus ready. "He gave enough. We all did."
The Ragman twitched. Pieces of it flaked away — and new ones fluttered in to replace them from the dead air.
> "Possibility costs more. The world cannot afford blank pages."
Then it lunged.
---
Elian reacted instinctively, drawing a Fracture Line glyph midair. The platform beneath the Ragman split — sending the creature crashing downward into the void.
But the fall didn't stop it.
The creature's body tore in half — and both halves became new Ragmen.
Quill cursed and hurled a Containment Ring, sealing one fragment in a spiral of burning ink.
The other rushed Elian.
It didn't strike with claws or fists.
It tried to absorb his Codex.
Ink tendrils wrapped around the book, hissing.
Elian screamed and drew the only thing that came to mind:
> Glyph: Identity Lock.
A sudden pulse.
The Codex blazed white.
The Ragman reeled back — its stolen names burning away. Screaming with voices that weren't its own.
Quill tackled it off the edge.
It vanished into non-space.
---
Silence again.
Elian fell to his knees, breath ragged.
"Quill—"
"I'm here."
The man hauled himself up over the edge, blood trailing from his lip.
"That glyph you used… it didn't just rewrite the map."
He pointed at Elian's Codex.
"It changed you."
Elian looked down.
The pages of his Codex were reshuffling on their own. Some were blank. Some were filled with future entries he hadn't written yet.
One glowed faintly:
> [Entry 43: The City That Forgot Its Name]
Status: In Progress.
He hadn't drawn that.
But somehow… he would.
---
"It's drawing ahead of me," Elian said, shaken.
"Your Codex isn't just recording anymore," Quill said. "It's writing you forward."
"What does that mean?"
"It means you're becoming a Living Glyph. A narrative vector. Someone the map uses to finish itself."
Elian's mouth went dry. "Is that what the Cartographer of Ash wanted?"
Quill looked grim.
"No. That's what he's afraid of."
---
The tower shuddered.
They looked up.
A glyph appeared in the air above the Spindle — not drawn, but branded into the sky itself.
A Cartographer's Guild Seal.
Someone — a Guild member — had just cast a planetary-level glyph remotely.
Elian's Codex flipped violently.
A message appeared:
> "Warning: Class-5 Territory Overwrite Enacted.
Destination: Sableline Cradle.
Time Remaining Before Initiation: 72 hours."
---
Elian stood, spine straightening.
"They're not just reacting. They're preparing a counter-glyph."
"Or a total purge," Quill muttered. "The Sableline Cradle… that's a dense Shard. Millions live there."
"They're going to remap it from orbit."
"They'll erase thousands just to stop one sigil."
Elian clenched his fists.
He looked down at the blank page in his Codex.
And then forward, toward the horizon beyond the Spindle's final edge.
> "Then we go there," he said quietly.
"Before they burn the world to save their map."
---
> In a sealed room beneath the Guild Tower,
a man with silver ink for blood
completed the first stroke
of the final glyph.