The world changed again – but not all at once.
It began with the margins narrowing. Paragraphs leaned in like walls of an alley, and the grammar of the terrain grew stricter. The deeper they walked, the more the world stopped feeling like imagination and more like… doctrine.
"There's too much structure here," Curata muttered. "This was rewritten recently."
Echo nodded. Even his ink felt stiffer, as if the air itself were enforcing editorial policy. Curves resisted. Lines trembled. The creative looseness of the fringe had vanished. Here, everything had a purpose, a role, a defined place.
Ash drew his cloak tighter. "Where are we headed again?"
"A chapter break," Curata said. "An old one. From before the last Canonical update."
Ash blinked. "Those still exist?"
"Some. If they were sealed before deletion."
Echo tilted his head. "What's in a sealed break?"
Curata didn't answer. Not right away. She only glanced toward a slope of rigid dialogue tags leading downward into a hollow.
"It's a place where nothing was meant to happen. But something did."
They descended.
The shift was immediate. Voices that weren't voices whispered around them – faint traces of exposition never delivered. Emotional beats that were queued but never assigned. Echo's skin prickled with the weight of paused expectations.
This wasn't a deleted scene.
It was a missing moment.
Ash crouched beside a tree whose bark resembled blacked-out red lines. He touched the surface, winced, and pulled back with fingers dusted in what looked like punctuation.
"Someone was edited here," he said.
Curata looked around. "No. Someone hid here. To avoid being edited."
They pressed further into the hollow, and the atmosphere thickened with story-pressure – dense and slow, like wading through a prologue that had been postponed.
Then they found it.
Not a camp. Not a library.
A chair.
Just a single chair in the middle of the nothingness. On it: a closed notebook.
Ash looked at it. "Is that… bait?"
"No," Echo whispered. "It's a confession."
He stepped forward, hand brushing the surface of the chair. It didn't disintegrate. The notebook didn't flicker. These weren't illusions or relics.
They were intentional.
He opened the book.
It didn't scream or resist.
It sighed.
Words spilled upward – not on the page, but into his head. A voice, calm and bitter.
"This world rewards what can be contained. But meaning leaks. I built a life between lines. I built a truth that refused format. So, they tried to close me into silence. But even footnotes learn to speak."
Echo's eyes widened.
This wasn't a character speaking.
This was a ghostwriter.
Ash watched uneasily. "What's it saying?"
"It's telling me it remembers the world before the Canon took over."
Curata moved beside him, eyes narrowed. "Before the Canon… or before the Editors?"
Echo turned to her. "Both."
The ink around his wrists pulsed. The thread from the burned clearing twitched, as if reacting to the notebook's presence.
He looked back at the page.
The last line had changed.
"If you are reading this, you have already broken something. Good. Keep going."
Ash exhaled. "That sounds… encouraging?"
"No," Curata said. "It sounds like permission."
The book closed on its own.
The chair creaked.
And something far away, in a place Echo hadn't yet seen, tilted slightly off-axis.
As if the story itself had begun to slant.