The tower loomed against a sky stitched shut by shadow.
Aeryn stood at its threshold, sword sheathed in runes, scroll bound to his arm, and name burning on his tongue. Behind him, the Unbound held formation, ready to stall the ash-wind and ink-wraiths now stirring across the ruined field.
Torren placed a hand on Aeryn's shoulder. "You don't come back without her."
Aeryn nodded once. "I won't come back at all if she's not with me."
Then he stepped forward and the gates unfolded, not opened, as if they were never doors but illusions stitched into the veil of perception.
He entered.
And the Tower swallowed him whole.
Level One: The Hall of Lies
The floor beneath him became ink.
Each step summoned reflections not of him but versions of himself that might have been.
A soldier.
A tyrant.
A boy who never lost his name.
They walked beside him, whispering.
"You could've saved her."
"You were stronger when you were no one."
"Aeryn Vale died the night you chose to live."
He ignored them.
They grew louder.
Then the walls bled with words—his words, torn from memory. Letters scraped from dreams.
He whispered Liora's name to himself like a lifeline and pressed forward.
Level Two: The Ink-Storm
The air grew thicker—liquid, suffocating. Ink rained from nowhere, crawling into his mouth, ears, eyes, trying to write itself into him.
The scroll on his arm flared.
The runes burned.
The ink hissed and fled.
But ahead, a figure stood: robed, faceless, bleeding stories from every seam.
The first of the Inkbound Guardians.
"You seek the girl," it intoned.
"I seek myself," Aeryn replied. "And she is part of that."
The guardian raised a hand.
Books fell from the sky every chapter of his life that never was.
To move forward, he had to burn them.
He did.
Level Three: The Library of Names
Shelves stretched beyond sight, filled with books titled not by subjects but by people.
Liora's name repeated dozens of times each version a different fate.
Dead at birth.
Queen of a shattered kingdom.
Murderer of the sun.
Betrayer of Aeryn Vale.
He ran his fingers along the spines, until one book sang beneath his touch.
Not a fate.
But a promise.
"I will find you," he whispered to the pages.
The book dissolved into light and showed him the path down.
At the Core: The Chamber of the Unwritten
He found her.
Liora was suspended mid-air, threads of ink holding her wrists, ankles, throat.
The Scribe stood at the base of a monolithic parchment, preparing to pen the final word.
"I warned you," the Scribe said, not turning. "You cannot rewrite what was always meant to be."
Aeryn stepped into the light, scroll unraveling from his arm.
"Then let me write this instead."
He raised the blade.
Liora's eyes flicked open.
And the tower began to scream.
---
The Scribe of Fates
The scream of the tower was not sound but language unraveling.
Aeryn stepped forward, boots pressing into shifting ink that sloshed like thought half-formed. His scroll hovered, animated with defiant glyphs, while the blade in his hand shimmered not with steel, but with a memory sharpened to kill.
Liora hung above, suspended in living calligraphy. Her eyes glistened, tears suspended mid-fall, a single word etched into her throat: Silence.
The Scribe turned.
Not a man.
Not a god.
Something in-between, clothed in robes stitched from unspoken truths. Its face was a mask of blank parchment, quivering as if something underneath struggled to form shape.
"You've come far, Aeryn Vale," it said, voice like quills scraping glass. "But this story was written long before your breath."
Aeryn raised his sword. "Then let's rewrite it."
The Scribe laughed, extending its hand. The ink holding Liora surged twisting into tendrils, slithering toward Aeryn.
Ink vs Flame
He swung.
Not at the tendrils—but at the air itself.
The blade tore into the lines between sentences, severing meaning. The attack wasn't physical—it was narrative. The Tower shuddered as grammar itself rebelled.
"Impossible," the Scribe hissed, recoiling. "You wield the Quillblade."
Aeryn advanced, his voice steady. "Given by the Unnamed. Paid for with a name. Mine."
The Scribe responded with a roar whole books erupted from its limbs, flapping like wings, each screaming a forgotten fate. They tore toward Aeryn like missiles.
He unraveled the scroll from his forearm sigils igniting midair.
"Let her go."
A single phrase written, willed, weaponized.
The books froze. Shivered. Then burned.
Liora gasped as the ink-bonds broke, and she fell straight into Aeryn's waiting arms.
Reunion
She clutched him, shaking, her voice hoarse. "You came back…"
"Always," he whispered, pressing his forehead to hers.
But behind them the Scribe was not done.
It bled.
It rewrote itself.
Its voice deepened, no longer confined to words.
"If the page rebels...
Then let the story die."
The chamber trembled.
From the monolithic parchment behind the Scribe, an abyss opened black, endless, swallowing not just light, but potential.
The Scribe stepped inside.
And pulled them in with it.
Elsewhere: The Surface Cracks
Far above, the Unbound watched as the Tower split vertically ink erupting from its seams. Mira staggered, clutching her staff.
"Something's changing," she gasped. "The story's collapsing inward."
Torren's hand tightened on his sword. "Then we go in."
"No," Mira said. "We remember them. That's how we keep them anchored."
She began to chant every memory of Aeryn, every word Liora ever spoke woven into a spell of remembrance.
Because if the Scribe erased them…
Only memory could bring them back.
---
The Inkheart Abyss
There was no falling.
Only dissolving.
Aeryn and Liora tumbled through the Inkheart Abyss, not as bodies, but as fragments of story memories peeling away in wisps of black fog. His childhood laughter vanished first, then her first breath as a child. Names. Places. Faces. Each unthreaded and scattered.
"Don't forget me," Liora whispered, voice trembling.
"I won't," Aeryn said. But even as he spoke, he felt her slipping from the words.
They landed hard.
Not on ground, but a flat, blank page that rippled underfoot. Around them stood towers of unread books. Above, no sky just ink raining upward.
In the distance, the Scribe stood atop a broken lectern.
"You resist deletion," it said, voice ringing across the void. "Then you shall be rewritten."
Aeryn rose, pulling Liora to her feet. "If I have to become something new to stop you, then I will."
The Scribe lifted its arm and the world responded.
The pages beneath them screamed. Ink burst upward like geysers. From each rose a creature—Malformed Narratives half-formed beasts with missing eyes, fragmented limbs, twisted by stories that never ended.
The Fight Beyond the Pen
Aeryn swung his Quillblade. Each slash edited the monsters tearing grammar from flesh, cutting verbs from motion. Liora, no longer silent, screamed incantations that became rebellions spells written in the margins of the Scribe's domain.
One of the monsters lunged.
She tore a single line from the air:
"This creature was never born."
It vanished.
The Scribe hissed, voice cracking.
"You defy causality. You wield memory like flame. But this is my realm. My ink."
Aeryn stepped forward, scroll burning in his hand.
"Then read this," he said and struck the page beneath them.
Rewriting the Abyss
The ground exploded in lines of gold—truth remembered.
Aeryn poured every moment into the void: his grief, his guilt, his fury, his love. Every unspoken promise, every regret, every word he thought he'd lost.
The blank world shivered.
The malformed beasts howled and began to crumble.
Liora stood beside him. "You're burning yourself out. Your soul—your name"
He smiled. "Then we write a better ending before I fade."
Together, they wrote.
Not with pen, but with presence.
Above: The Spell Holds
In the realm above, Mira screamed as the tower began collapsing. Torren anchored her with his blade embedded in the stone. Their voices, their memories, fed the anchor spell holding Aeryn and Liora in place as long as they could.
"The tower won't hold much longer," Mira cried.
"Just give them time," Torren growled.
Below: The Scribe Breaks
The Scribe screamed.
Cracks ran across its mask. The parchment peeled, revealing not a god, but a soul buried beneath endless drafts.
"You... you were never meant to be the author!"
Aeryn stepped forward, voice raw.
"No one is."
He plunged the Quillblade into the Scribe's chest.
The creature collapsed not with violence, but surrender.
And the page beneath them turned.