The Grove did not rest. It could not.
Even with the Listener dissolved, its spores lingered. Blank paper clung to branches like frost. When touched, the sheets quivered—waiting to be written on. Waiting to reclaim what had just been freed.
The Keeper stared at them with hollow eyes. She knew the temptation: to give shape, to inscribe. But every quill stroke might summon the Listener again, reincarnated not as tyrant but as archive.
"Do not write," she whispered to herself. "Do not restore."
Her hand shook anyway.
The Unkeeper laughed, teeth black with paradox. "You say 'do not,' and in saying, you've already drafted a command. And what is a command if not a story?"
The Grove groaned at the contradiction, leaves flickering between metaphors: sometimes fire, sometimes wings, sometimes applause.
The Kin in Fracture
