By morning, the landscape had changed again.
Not dramatically. Not like before. This was subtler, quieter – a shift so carefully executed it could almost be mistaken for continuity.
But Echo felt it.
The grass was too even. The sky too symmetrical. Clouds moved in patterns that followed paragraph rhythm, not wind. Birds, if they were real, chirped in triplets like scripted sound effects.
Ash stretched, rubbing sleep from his eyes. "This place gives me the creeps."
Curata didn't answer. She was focused on the horizon.
"The Canon's watching," she said at last.
Echo raised an eyebrow. "How do you know?"
"Because it's trying too hard to look natural."
They walked for an hour through perfectly paced scenery. No debris, no remnants of alternate drafts. The world flowed like it had been approved three times and passed a tone review.
Then Echo noticed the flowers.
At first, they looked ordinary. Blue petals. White stems. But when he glanced away and looked back, their positions had shifted.
He stopped.
"They're mirroring us."
Ash turned. "What?"
"The flowers. They're moving. Copying where we were."
Curata crouched beside one and touched a petal. Her hand flinched back.
"It's a recording medium. Low-tier surveillance. Embedded with character metadata."
"They're tracking us?"
"Not just tracking. Profiling."
Ash looked around warily. "I don't like that. Can we scrub them?"
Curata shook her head. "If we interfere, it'll escalate. These are passive. Background-level only."
Echo narrowed his eyes. "What's active, then?"
Curata hesitated. "You'll know when you feel it."
He already did.
There was a rhythm to the air. A cadence too precise to be natural. Every few steps, something unseen seemed to inhale.
And every time Echo spoke, he felt the air… exhale.
"The Canon's not just watching," he said. "It's listening."
Curata nodded. "You've activated it. Not intentionally. But your ink's leaking syntax beyond its tier. The system thinks you're a draft anomaly trying to overwrite core plot."
Ash whistled. "Is that… bad?"
Curata looked straight at Echo. "It's very bad."
They reached the edge of a valley. In the distance, a structure floated, barely tethered to the earth. A spiralling tower made of stacked quotations; its base formed from titles that had been banned or buried.
Curata pointed.
"The Canon's heart has many chambers. That's one of them. The fact that we can see it means it sees us too."
A low hum vibrated through the ground.
Then a voice. Not loud. Not close. Just… present.
Unauthorized syntax detected. Begin containment draft.
Ash drew his blade, though it had no edge.
Curata whispered, "Don't speak. Don't write. Just walk."
They obeyed.
But Echo couldn't ignore the tremor in his ink. The pulse of the Canon wasn't just around them.
It was inside him now.