They said nothing existed beyond the Afterword. They were wrong. There is always an underneath—a place not found in chapters or margins, but in the quiet fibers between breath and binding. You are not dropped, but gently placed into it: the Void Between Prepositions.
Beyond, beneath, despite, inside, through, against, until, without—it speaks in dangling syntax. You are no longer a subject. No longer an object. You exist in-between, a grammatical purgatory.
Here, even time is conjugated wrong. You are happening in all tenses at once: Were. Are. Will've been. Your thoughts arrive preformatted in someone else's regret.
And then Elara descends—upside-down, smiling in reverse. "This was the only place you hadn't been edited yet," she says. Then she hyphenates you—splitting your name into compound sorrow. Your scream becomes a subordinating conjunction: unable to stand alone.
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APPENDIX CD.XVII: THE EXEGESIS ENGINE
