The wind howled louder here. It was no longer the warm, whistling breeze of the lowlands but something ancient, high, and hollow. Silas stood alone near the edge of a crumbling cliff, the sky above stretching into an ocean of silver clouds. The sun was a pale disc behind the mist, and beneath him was a yawning void—a chasm so wide and dark it looked as though the world had been torn open.
He had climbed for days, leaving behind the last cheerful border town, past broken temples and shrines no longer worshiped. Each step had been more difficult than the last, not because the path was steep—but because of something stranger. The world felt thinner here. Lighter. As if the air were not meant to be breathed by someone like him.
Silas drew a breath anyway.
He reached into the inside of his white cloak. His fingers brushed the hidden pen, the one that had no ink, and no weight—but carried something greater than either. He didn't pull it out yet. Not here. Not while everything still felt so unsure.
He turned behind him. No one had followed.
He was alone with the wind.
Then, the wind stilled.
It was sudden. Unnatural. Every breeze died at once. The grass that had been swaying along the cliff's edge fell still. Even the distant rustle of wings or branches faded. The silence was not silence—it was expectancy. A breath drawn in, held.
Silas stepped forward.
The chasm responded.
Not with sound, but feeling.
It was faint—a flicker, like someone watching. No eyes. Just awareness. He had felt this once before. In the forest, on the day he awoke in this new world. But here it was stronger, almost loud in the silence. His hand moved to the pen again, not in fear but in instinct.
"Are you here?" Silas asked softly.
There was no answer.
Not yet.
So he knelt. The grass was cool beneath him, and he reached out to the air. His fingers began to move as if across invisible keys. Slowly. Deliberately. Like playing the piano. Lines of faint silver traced his fingertips, arcing through the air in symbols he could not yet read.
He wrote.
And as he did, something stirred inside the chasm.
A ripple.
A shimmer.
Like the edge of a veil being touched by unseen hands.
Silas paused, his pen hovering. His heart beat faster. He could feel something beneath the cliff, something beyond it—not space, not another city, but… possibility. Like a doorway waiting to open if only he found the right word.
So he tried.
He wrote again, this time a single question:
Where does the story end?
The silver shimmer pulsed.
And then…
Nothing.
The shimmer receded, vanishing back into the dark.
The wind returned all at once, rushing around him in a burst of cold. The spell, if it had been a spell, was broken.
But not all was lost.
Where he had written, the air still shimmered faintly. Not like magic—but memory. A trace. A clue. Something had answered him… but only barely. A path, perhaps, but one invisible to all others.
He stood, clutching the pen tight now.
"Not yet," he whispered. "But soon."
And he turned back from the cliff, determined to learn more. To understand the layers hidden behind this world of swords and wonder. To prepare for the next place.
He did not know what it was called.
But he knew it was waiting.
You saw it too, didn't you?
That glimmer. That subtle fold in the edge of this world. That wasn't a mistake. That was the first boundary of the First Layer—the thinnest curtain between illusion and revelation.
Silas does not yet know what he touched. Not truly. But let me whisper it to you, dear Reader.
This world—the one with kingdoms and monsters and guilds—is vast. Colossal. Yet it is only the faintest flicker within the First Layer. The lowest rung. The base script. The foundation of a great tower that has no top.
Above this? There is The Room.
Above The Room? There is The Void.
Above The Void? The Hotel.
And far beyond all this, where even names wither to dust, there is a place the ink fears and the pen yearns for.
But for now, he is still in the world that sings of steel and spell.
Still bound by pages yet unwritten.
Still wandering.
But not for long.
Because the ink remembers.
And so do I.
I am the Narrator.
And I will speak again.