: Shards of Yesterday
They didn't speak for a long time.
The rewritten world breathed slowly around them—a realm reshaped not by triumph, but by restraint. Mountains moved to different horizons. Rivers reversed their flow. Cities reappeared like forgotten names remembered in dreams. And yet, despite the changes, the sky still bore the pale shimmer of cracked glass—a reminder that something had broken, and had not fully healed.
Chris stood at the edge of a cliff where fire met frost. Her hands still trembled when she looked into any reflective surface. The mirror had followed her. Not physically—but in fragments, in flickers. In every glint of water, every polished blade. Wale was gone.
But also not.
She could feel it—his presence lingering like a half-formed thought at the edge of her mind.
"Peace looks strange," Kairo said beside her.
He wore a cloak of woven wind now, his old robes lost in the unraveling. His eyes, once a storm of visions, had gone quiet. But Chris knew better than to think they had gone blind.
"Too quiet," she murmured.
He nodded. "Stillness before a new page is turned."
Grey joined them from behind, sheathing his sword in the binding leather scabbard he had forged from Wale's discarded verses. He no longer called himself a knight. Just a reader.
"This world is healing," he said. "But we didn't cleanse it. We just… paused the bleeding."
Chris turned to face them both. "Then let's not waste the time we bought."
They traveled for weeks through shifting lands, each place warped by remnants of the Labyrinth's story. In one forest, trees whispered dialogue from battles never fought. In a shattered city, people walked through life repeating a single day like a song stuck on a loop.
Kairo studied the phenomenon, taking notes in a blank journal that refused to stay written. Words erased themselves hours after being penned.
"Reality's still folding back on itself," he explained. "The story never finished. We closed the book… but didn't seal it."
Chris didn't answer.
Because she had already seen the first sign.
Wale was writing again.
It began subtly.
A boy in a market claimed he'd dreamed of a man with no shadow, offering him a story to read aloud.
A well dried up overnight—its reflection replaced by a different sky.
An orphan girl recited a poem she didn't know, and everyone who heard it forgot their own name for a day.
Chris recognized the pattern.
"These aren't echoes," she said one night around a dwindling campfire. "They're tests. He's learning what parts of himself survived."
Grey remained quiet.
Kairo frowned. "Then we stop him."
Chris looked down at her reflection in a bowl of water—and for a split second, it smiled back at her.
Their journey led them to the Ruins of Refrain—a city that never sang.
Here, they found a man whose eyes were mirror-glass.
He called himself Page.
"I am not Wale," he told them. "But I remember him. I am one of many fragments, born the moment the Book closed."
Chris narrowed her eyes. "You're a shard."
"A story Wale never told," Page replied with a sad smile. "But I've read him. And I can show you what he fears."
Kairo hesitated. "Why help us?"
Page looked at the empty sky.
"Because I want to be real."
They followed him through an ancient theater buried beneath the city. The stage was cracked, but the curtains still stirred.
"This was where Wale's first tale began," Page whispered. "Before he was a villain. Before he became your monster."
In the center of the stage lay a mirror—shattered beyond recognition. And surrounding it were hundreds of scripts.
Each one with a different version of Wale's life.
In one, he was a hero. In another, a sacrifice. In one, just a child who wanted to be loved.
"He was written too many times," Page said. "Each version stripped something away."
Chris knelt before one script and read it aloud:
"He learned to lie before he learned to cry. Because no one taught him sorrow was allowed to be shared."
Something inside her cracked.
Kairo placed a hand on her shoulder. "He wasn't born a monster."
"No," she whispered. "But the world made him one."
Grey spoke for the first time since they entered.
"Then what does that make us?"
They left the theater changed.
Page remained behind—fading as they walked away, like a chapter finally turned.
Outside, the stars were different.
Kairo gasped as he looked up.
"The story's adapting again," he said. "Not just reacting. Rewriting itself without him."
Chris stared at the sky—and realized what Wale had done.
"He didn't want to win," she said. "He wanted to last. To become the ink the world would use to keep telling itself stories."
Grey looked grim. "And he did."
Kairo turned to them. "Then we must decide—what story do we want to tell next?"
The journey didn't end.
Because stories don't end.
They change.
Chris kept walking—chasing the remnants, the reflections, the echoes of a monster who once believed he was more than his worst day. Grey continued searching for untainted verses. Kairo listened for the future, now aware that some futures shouldn't be written.
And in the quiet places, when the wind carried no voice—
They heard the faintest whisper:
"I am still here."
And they remembered—
Some monsters are never slain.
Only understood.