The Inklands folded in on themselves, not like a closing book, but like a wound reluctantly healing.
Ash spiraled upward, dancing into patterns before scattering. The black river, once vast and dense, thinned into tendrils, disappearing beneath the glassy surface of the ground. The shifting script stopped flowing. The sky hardened into matte gray—quiet, inert.
But Veriss did not vanish.
Instead, he remained upon the last fragment of the platform, surrounded by void, waiting.
Aouli paused before crossing into the border between worlds. He turned.
Veriss lifted a hand.
Not in farewell.
In summons.
Aouli glanced at Kaero, who nodded. "I'll wait."
Then Aouli stepped back toward the Echo.
The silence between them was long.
Finally, Veriss spoke.
"You forced my world to break its own rules. That is not easily undone."
"I didn't come to undo it," Aouli said. "I came because I need to understand why it mattered to you."
Veriss's cowl tilted slightly. The runes on his robe no longer flowed—frozen now, as if he himself had turned to script.
"In my first life, I was a historian," Veriss said. "Not of Earth. But of a world called Ettavarn. A world of libraries and mountains. We believed in record. In preservation."
He paused.
"Then came the Fireshade Plague. It wiped out three generations in a single season. Children, elders, entire languages. A grief so total it collapsed our sense of time."
Veriss lifted a hand, and from the ground, a flickering image formed—books burning in piles, each with a face embossed on the cover. Screams without voices. A woman holding an urn carved with music notes.
"I was chosen to write our history," Veriss said. "The final tome. The official memory. And I... made changes."
Aouli frowned. "You rewrote it?"
"I erased parts," Veriss said. "Small ones. Untruths. Or so I thought. I made the leaders braver. I gave families dignity in death they never had. I softened our failure into a warning, instead of an apology."
He closed his hand.
The image vanished.
"My lies were beautiful. But they spread. Became canon. Became comfort. And then, became silence."
Aouli didn't speak.
Veriss stepped closer.
"I was punished. Not by gods. By truth itself. The living record rejected me. It made me Echo. Bound me to this archive of memory—not to preserve it, but to suffer it."
A pause.
"Until now."
Aouli looked down at the obsidian seed in his satchel.
"You gave me a part of your punishment."
"I gave you a part of my hope," Veriss corrected. "I could not bear it. But perhaps, one born of Gaia might."
Aouli felt a quiet anger building inside him. Not at Veriss. At the burden—at the idea that every gift was just someone else's unhealed wound.
"You think rewriting is always wrong?"
Veriss studied him.
"No. I think rewriting must be owned. It must be declared. It must not pretend to be truth."
He pointed to the tome in Aouli's satchel.
"That book will grow with you. So will your story. But every page must declare itself. Not hide. Not pretend it was always that way."
Aouli nodded slowly.
"Then I won't erase anything. I'll just... continue."
Veriss stepped forward.
He reached up and placed his hand gently over Aouli's chest.
A warmth spread there—not from light, not from power.
From witness.
"I have watched every star forget," Veriss said. "I will watch yours remember."
Then the Echo stepped back.
The last of the Inklands peeled away.
Veriss did not fall.
He folded—into pages, into script, into the blank tome in Aouli's bag.
Gone.
But not lost.
Aouli rejoined Kaero, who looked up with guarded curiosity.
"That looked intense."
"It was," Aouli said. "But we're done here."
Kaero nodded and turned to the shimmering threshold ahead.
"Where to now?"
Aouli didn't answer immediately.
He opened the tome.
The first page still bore his light-scrawled truth.
He turned it.
Blank.
He turned again.
And again.
On the tenth page, new text began to write itself—not in his hand, but Veriss's.
Ink is a mirror.Story is a choice.You are the moment between them.
Aouli smiled.
And walked forward.