The sky held its breath.
The Garden quieted.
And the world, once written in certainty, now trembled at the edge of a margin not drawn by control, but by invitation.
Aiden stared at the quill suspended above the horizon. It did not move. It did not write. It only waited—like a question asked at the beginning of time, and never answered.
Beside him, the Editor remained kneeling.
Its shape no longer seamless.
Cracks ran through its form like punctuation errors in a draft too long denied revision. The red ink was gone. The blue had slowed. And from its mask—fractured, peeling—came silence.
Elowen placed her lantern on the ground.
It dimmed.
Not in defeat.
In reverence.
"Something is coming," she said.
"No," Aiden replied. "Something is returning."
From the space behind the quill, where no page had ever been written, light began to curl inward—not golden, not silver, but the raw white of possibility.
It came without sound.
Without declaration.
