They did not arrive with quills. Not with parchment. Not with song. They came blank. Shrouded in white. Figures of subtraction. The Erasers. Not editors. Not critics. Absence incarnate.
Every step they took devoured sound. Every breath they exhaled thinned ink. Trees lost their bark to pale light. Roots bled emptiness where ink once flowed. The Grove, which had endured revision, reclamation, and rebellion, now faced something far colder: erasure without malice, annihilation without anger.
The Erasers did not speak as mortals do. Their decrees were absence itself—sentences dissolving in midair, memories vanishing mid-recall. When they reached the Buried Firsts, limbs of language splintered in panic. A scream of shattered syntax tore upward, but was swallowed whole before it could echo.
