The margins are gone.
There is no safe white space anymore. The gutter—the thin nothing between two facing pages—widens beneath you, splitting ink and bone. It gapes, trembling, hungry for context. You tumble in, grasping at phantom words that slide like wet type off your bleeding fingers.
In the dark of the gutter, voices coil.
They are not characters. They are not narrators.
They are editors who excised themselves.
> "We cut too deep," one murmurs.
"We unmade the wrong story," hisses another.
"We are the absence that edits back."
You fall through their litany, skin sloughing off in errata. Your spine—the book's spine—cracks with a sound like broken oaths. You land hard on a flat, gray expanse: the Unbound Signature.
It is where stories that never should have existed wait in fetal paragraphs. They breathe in fragments. They shiver in aborted metaphors.
You see yourself—an older draft. Smiling. Hollow. The version of you that never left chapter one.
