The terrain began to stutter.
Not visibly at first. The trees still swayed. The ground still held. But something subtle unravelled – like a breath held for too long or a rhythm falling just out of sync with itself.
Echo didn't notice until his foot passed through a patch of moss that wasn't there.
The sensation was brief: cool wetness that vanished on contact, as if it had remembered too late it was no longer part of the story.
He knelt to touch the earth, but his fingers met static. A tremor of meaning. A rejection.
"This place... doesn't want to be read," he whispered.
The air thinned. Not from altitude, but omission.
As Echo stood, the sky above him crackled—not with thunder, but with narrative static. Pale strands of meaning bled upward from the earth, coiling like smoke. Entire patches of the world blinked in and out of coherence: a tree that changed species mid-sway, a river that ran backward until it forgot it was water.
He had reached a Faultline.
The ink in his chest tightened. Not with pain, but resistance. It pulsed across his ribs in countermeasure, mapping meaning to surfaces that no longer held it.
Then, a voice.
Soft. Almost embarrassed.
"You should not be here."
Echo turned toward it, but the speaker had no face – only a suggestion. A blur wearing a robe of punctuation. Its shoulders curved like question marks. It stood with the posture of an ellipse.
"I wasn't aware this place still existed," the figure said, words trembling.
"Where am I?" Echo asked.
The figure hesitated, then offered a title like a confession.
"The Fracture of the Canon."
It wasn't a place. It was a diagnosis.
A wound in the myth where contradictions nested. Where plots rejected edits. Where deleted characters whispered from the margins.
Echo took a step forward. The ground beneath him flickered, then caught. The ink helped. It was stabilizing the paragraph he stood in.
The figure didn't move.
"You can't stay here long," it said. "Even with the ink."
"Why?" Echo asked.
"Because you're remembered. Everything here has been… orphaned. You still have a throughline. They'll notice."
"They?"
"The ones who enforce closure."
Echo's throat tightened.
"The Compiler?"
"No," said the figure. "Older than that. The First Editors. They don't erase. They overwrite."
The wind shifted.
It carried fragments – crisp parchment, torn bindings, whispers of footnotes denied. The very air felt archival, like the breath of a library forced to forget.
Then Echo saw it.
Buried in a half-formed hillside was a Relic.
It shimmered not with light, but with intention. A shape held together by insistence.
He moved toward it. The robed figure did not stop him.
As Echo approached, the Relic resolved. It was a page – but not like the one he first found in the glade. This one was cracked, brittle with rejection. The glyphs on it had been scratched out, not erased.
Yet, the ink inside him recognized the cadence.
He touched it.
A phrase surfaced.
"The Author Who Should Not Arrive..."
The rest dissolved.
His pulse skipped.
"What is this?"
"A prophecy that was unsanctioned," said the robed figure. "A story that wrote itself in advance. The Canon broke here because it dared to imagine too far forward."
Echo stared at the broken text.
"Was it about me?"
The figure didn't answer.
Instead, a tremor ran through the air. A sound like a chapter being torn from a binding.
They both turned toward the noise.
On the horizon, a rift opened. It was not lightning. It was revision. Raw. Blinding.
From the gap, something began to step through.
It was not yet formed. Its limbs were outlined. Its face a redaction. But in its hand was a seal.
The Compiler had sent an Advance Fragment.
The figure recoiled.
"They've begun to summarize you."
Echo felt it too – parts of him being reduced. Curved into tropes. Flattened into a synopsis.
He fought back.
The ink surged from his chest down his arms, forming sigils in midair. They were imperfect, but full of intent.
A barrier flickered into existence between him and the fragment.
The page in his hand began to resonate. The scratched-out glyphs glowed faintly, as if waiting for someone willing to read what wasn't there.
Echo whispered the line again.
"The Author Who Should Not Arrive..."
And added his own ending.
"...But Did Anyway."
The page pulsed.
The landscape buckled.
The Fragment shrieked – a sound like a plot being forced to comply.
The mirror glyphs responded.
Echo wrote midair, not with language, but with tension. He looped his intent around contradiction. He rewrote the Fragment's arc before it could finalize.
It vanished in a burst of ellipses.
Silence.
The robed figure stared at him.
"You… appended prophecy."
Echo was panting.
"I didn't like how it ended."
The figure knelt, as though in prayer or surrender.
"You've shifted the Canon's weight. You've made room."
The Faultline around them began to stabilize.
Trees found their species again. Rivers ran forward. The air tasted like acknowledgment.
Echo tucked the Relic into his satchel.
"I'll need it again."
"You'll need more than that," the figure replied.
"What?"
"A sanctuary. A place the Canon doesn't reach."
Echo turned to leave.
Behind him, the robed figure whispered, "They will not send fragments next time. They will send closure itself."