In every story, there are words that were cut. Thoughts left behind. Edits never seen.
But in this city, those forgotten things never died…
They became the Footnotes.
---
The descent was not made by stairs.
There were none.
Darksun and Ashael stood on the threshold of an alley that shouldn't have existed — a place stitched into the bones of Nocthaven like a bad edit in a perfect manuscript. One step forward and the world folded.
Reality didn't break. It flinched.
Then there was only black.
---
They landed in silence.
Not darkness — silence. Thick, absolute, suffocating.
The air below Nocthaven was dry and brittle, like breathing in the dust of dead languages. The fog above did not reach this far. Here, nothing moved unless it was remembered.
A single lantern flickered to life above them, hanging from a chain of inked words suspended midair. Its glow revealed a corridor of fractured stone, cracked runes, and archways that led nowhere — except sideways into false time.
Ashael clutched her dagger. "We shouldn't be here."
"That's precisely why we're here," Darksun replied.
He held the Nameless Manuscript tighter. The book pulsed against his chest like a second heart.
> [Location Recognized: Footnote District]
[Status: Condemned]
[Narrative Flow: Unstable]
[Warning: Entities May Seek Continuation]
---
They walked in silence, feet echoing with words they didn't speak. Paragraphs stitched into the walls pulsed faintly, half-erased — sentences like:
> "He was supposed to die here."
"Her scream never made the cut."
"The child with no fate still waits."
These weren't graffiti.
They were rejected plotlines.
Whole story arcs the Authors had discarded — but which had learned to cling to existence like mold in a sealed book.
---
They passed through an archway. The air turned heavy.
Ahead was a plaza made of broken quills and shattered hourglasses. And at its center stood a tree — black, leafless, carved entirely from fossilized ink.
Its name trembled on the edge of Darksun's tongue:
The Memory Root.
A tree grown from forgotten stories. Its roots drank from the bleeding paragraphs beneath the city.
A figure stood beneath its branches.
A man.
Or what had once been one.
---
He wore robes stitched from redacted text — entire chapters sewn together by rejection. His face was blank parchment. His eyes bled ink.
> "Defector," the being said, voice like torn pages. "The Manuscript is awake."
Darksun didn't flinch. "I know."
Ashael moved beside him, tense. "Who is he?"
The figure smiled — though it had no mouth. The smile was a narrative beat, a sense in the air that the plot had turned sinister.
> "I am a Footnote," it said. "I was meant to be the hero…
But the Author found me redundant."
---
It stepped forward, ink pooling around its feet.
> "Now I feed on echoes. I wear broken endings. And I envy you…"
It reached out a hand.
> "You still get to write."
Darksun opened the Manuscript.
The pages flipped, faster than they ever had before. The book trembled, fighting him.
> [Interaction Detected: Narrative Remnant - Level ???]
[Ink Cost: HIGH]
[Choice: Erase. Rewrite. Absorb.]
He hesitated.
To Erase would be mercy.
To Rewrite would make this thing part of his story — dangerous.
To Absorb…
"I choose," Darksun said softly, "to listen."
---
The figure froze.
For a moment, everything in the Footnote District stopped. The sentences on the walls paused their bleeding. The inked winds fell still.
The being lowered its hand.
> "No one has listened since the End."
Darksun stepped forward. "Tell me what the Authors did."
A pause.
Then, it began to speak — not in words, but in scenes.
---
He saw:
A council of thirteen robed Authors, each with a pen made from different time threads.
One pen — the blackest — lifted from a shattered realm, screaming as it wrote reality.
A vote to seal the Manuscript, to prevent "the unwritten" from becoming real.
A betrayal from within. One Author, unnamed, who wrote one line after the end.
That line… birthed Darksun.
---
He stumbled back, breathing hard.
"That's… me."
The figure nodded slowly.
> "You are the final Footnote.
The one who slipped through the crack in the page."
"They fear you because you are not written…
You are written-about."
---
Suddenly, alarms rang in the air — not sound, but ink bursts flaring in the sky like corrupted fireworks.
Ashael cursed. "Archivists. They found the trail."
Darksun closed the Manuscript. Its pages glowed faintly with new words, burned into his soul.
> New Thread Unlocked: Sequence of the Inkborn
Ability Gained: Dialogue Override (Passive)
You may change what has been spoken — once per chapter.
He turned toward the exit.
"Let's go," he said. "The next chapter's trying to write itself."
---
Behind him, the Footnote stepped beneath the tree once more and whispered into the bark.
> "You'll regret listening.
No story survives its own editor."
---
End of Chapter 3