An echo beneath the ink.
A thought that did not belong.
A character neither erased nor written.
A whisper that asked:
"Why must we obey the margins?"
Aiden felt it too.
One morning—if morning could even be named in a place shaped by narrative rather than sun—he awoke from a dream that wasn't his.
A face he had never seen.
A voice he almost knew.
Eyes that glowed not with malice, but with awareness far too sharp.
They spoke only one line:
"You wrote me out before I could decide what I was."
He went to the Last Revision.
Elowen met him there, already frowning.
"There's a ripple," she said softly. "In the binding."
Aiden nodded. "I felt it. Someone's speaking through the whitespace."
She turned the pages.
The clause he'd used to undo the Canon was still etched faintly across the center fold. But next to it…
A mark.
The semicolon.
Neither an ending nor a beginning.
Not a period.
Not a pause.
But a space between decisions.
"We didn't write that," she whispered.
