The Grove's new season did not only drift—it devoured.
Margins widened like hungry mouths. At first, the Kin thought it was simply absence. Blankness, a reprieve. But soon the white edges began to crawl, gnawing at branches, swallowing fragments whole. Stories that once stumbled into the open air were now nibbled to silence before they could take root.
The Framers wept at lost arcs. The Smearwrights laughed, saying, "Even the page itself rejects your cages." The Median Kin whispered that the Grove was writing itself away.
The Keeper tested the margin's appetite, offering it a torn scrap of her robe. The whiteness swallowed it instantly, leaving only a faint outline, as if memory itself were bleaching.
"It does not hunger for words," she murmured. "It hungers for edges. For all that tries to define."
And at that, the Unkeeper bared her teeth. "Then perhaps it is our kin. For what are we if not the destroyers of outline?"
