They emerged onto a narrow ridge of bone-white stone that overlooked a vast emptiness.
The Inklands, behind them, had ceased to be. Not crumbled. Not burned. Just… ceased. The river was gone. The platform vanished. No echo. No wind. Not even dust.
Ash no longer fell from the sky.
Aouli turned back once more. Where the great archive of memory had stood—where he had walked the river of grief and written in the light of another's story—there was only blankness. A still, unfathomable quiet.
He touched the tome at his side.
It pulsed gently.
Kaero came to stand beside him, his face calmer than it had been in days.
"Did it take something from you?" he asked.
"No," Aouli said. "It gave me someone else."
Kaero gave him a long look.
Then he smiled.
Not wide. Not triumphant.
Just enough to mean: I see you.
They walked.
The ridge narrowed into a spiral path of stone, etched with ancient glyphs that neither of them could read. But the symbols were less like writing, more like weathered thought—as though they had emerged over centuries from the pressure of all those who passed here before.
Aouli's boots kicked up nothing.
There was no debris, no residue.
Just this clean, weightless path, guiding them forward.
The horizon bent—literally curved, folding upward like a page being turned.
Kaero took a deep breath.
"So, that's four now."
Aouli nodded.
He pulled out the seeds one by one.
The green one, from Gaia, still warm.
The silver one, from the Liminal, like condensed memory.
The violet one, shaped from the first reality—chaos and failed restoration.
And now, the obsidian one.
Cold. Waiting.
Kaero whistled. "That's a lot of responsibility for a kid born five minutes after the apocalypse."
Aouli smiled. "Feels like longer."
Kaero grew quiet again.
They reached a plateau.
A natural resting place, halfway between wherever they had been and wherever they were going.
There, they sat.
For the first time, neither spoke immediately.
The stars above were closer now, as if leaning in to listen.
Kaero broke the silence. "Back in the memory loop... I saw her again. My sister."
Aouli said nothing.
Kaero went on: "She said something. It wasn't part of the memory."
Aouli turned to him, alert. "What was it?"
Kaero stared at the sky.
"She said, 'Stop carrying the weight like it's mine.'"
His voice cracked on the last word.
Aouli waited.
Kaero exhaled.
"I think I've been walking with her ghost in my chest. Not because she asked me to—but because I didn't know what else to hold."
Aouli reached into his satchel and pulled out the tome.
He flipped it open.
The ink shimmered faintly on the last page.
Kaero raised an eyebrow.
"Don't tell me you're going to write my line again."
"No," Aouli said.
"I'm going to write ours."
He raised the quill Veriss had given him.
But before he touched the page, he stopped.
Instead, he closed the tome.
And on the leather cover, with one fingertip, glowing softly, he wrote:
This is not where it ends.
The line faded a moment later.
But the warmth of it remained.
They stood.
And walked forward.
Into the next unknown.
But this time, they did not look back.
The Inklands had gone silent.
But within Aouli, the story was only beginning to speak.