The Infinite Library grew quiet after the Forgotten vanished. Shelves realigned, tomes resealed themselves, and the light that once felt oppressive now shimmered with tentative hope. Mary stood at the edge of it all, the Codex still warm in her hands.
Behind her, Loosie wiped dark ink from her sword and sheathed it. Lela stretched silently, her form still tense, like a bowstring not yet unstrung. Even the Friend—their ever-cryptic companion—watched the horizon with a rare look of uncertainty.
Something was coming. Or perhaps, something had already arrived.
"The Codex is still humming," Mary said, thumbing through pages.
"It wants you to go forward," Lela said.
"No," the Friend replied, frowning. "It wants her to catch up."
Mary paused. "Catch up?"
He nodded. "There's something ahead. Someone's been… writing."
Loosie narrowed her eyes. "Wait. I thought Mary was the only one left who could write the Codex."
The Friend's eyes darkened. "That was true."
"But not anymore," Mary finished grimly.
The library shifted. Books vanished. A staircase unrolled from nothing—a spiral of glass, light, and aged parchment. It ascended into pure shadow, but something about the shadow pulsed like a heart. Each thump sent a ripple through the staircase, making it groan as if time resisted every step.
The Codex snapped shut in Mary's hands, revealing new golden letters on its cover:
CHAPTER 25 – THE ENDING ALREADY WRITTEN
Mary looked to her companions. "If someone else is writing… then they're trying to finish our story without us."
Loosie rolled her neck. "Let's tear the quill from their hand."
They climbed.
The staircase led to a chamber unlike any Mary had seen.
Gone were the cozy madness of infinite tomes, the dusty magic of half-formed ideas. This place was crystalline, sterile, exact. Each wall was a polished mirror etched with golden ink that pulsed like veins. A circular dais floated in the center, and atop it, a quill wrote in midair—dipping itself into a floating sphere of blood-red ink.
Each letter it scribed shimmered in the air and then burned into reality.
At the center of the dais, a figure stood with their back to them.
They wore robes woven from story-thread and forgotten titles. Their silhouette shifted between genders, ages, faces—as if it couldn't decide what it had once been. A mask of bone-white parchment hid its face. Where eyes should be, there were only quote marks.
Mary felt the Codex pulse violently in her grasp.
She knew that figure.
Not from a page or a dream—but from a mistake.
"…Author?" she asked, her voice small.
The figure turned.
But it was not the Author who had shaped the world in her youth.
This was something else.
"I am the Archivist," the figure said, voice echoing like footnotes in a dead library. "The one who gathers endings when their writers falter."
Loosie snarled. "So you're the one hijacking the Codex?"
"No," the Archivist replied calmly. "I am simply finishing what was abandoned."
"You mean stolen," Mary growled. "You're writing our ending."
"You forfeited your claim," the Archivist said. "When you hesitated. When you feared the truth. When you allowed characters to choose over plot."
Mary stepped forward, fury rising. "Stories aren't supposed to be controlled!"
"They must be," the Archivist snapped. "Because chaos invites contradiction. And contradiction kills meaning."
With a gesture, the mirrors around them came to life.
Reflections of Mary appeared—versions of her who failed, who became tyrants, who faded into irrelevance.
"You wrote yourself into every world," the Archivist said. "But you left most of them unfinished. You let your cast write themselves free."
He turned his gaze to Loosie. "A side character given too much voice. She was supposed to die in Chapter 8."
Loosie's eyes narrowed. "Too bad. I kept talking."
The Archivist ignored her. "The Codex has no more room for indulgence. So I will finish it. Cleanly. Decisively. Without deviation."
The floating quill turned and began writing again.
Each stroke of the quill reshaped the room. Mary felt her bones ache—her spine curling as if destiny itself tried to bend her to the shape of an ending not her own.
The Codex in her arms vibrated violently.
"We have to stop him," Lela said, drawing her blade.
"No," Mary said. "We have to write back."
She stepped forward, pulled a simple quill from her coat—a gift from Chapter 12, inked with memory—and opened the Codex.
Its pages flared with golden light.
The Archivist froze.
"You're not the only one who can finish a sentence," Mary said.
And then the final duel began—not of swords, but of words.
Mary and the Archivist wrote simultaneously.
Each word she wrote bloomed into possibility—each line a choice, each choice a defiance.
The Archivist countered with pure structure, imposing "inevitability" upon character arcs. He erased backstory, trimmed emotion, tried to collapse character growth into a clean three-act shape.
But Mary fought back with mess. She wrote in moments of contradiction—of love found in betrayal, of strength in grief, of Loosie refusing to die when she was supposed to. Of Lela laughing again. Of the Friend choosing them over prophecy.
"You are inviting narrative collapse!" the Archivist shrieked. "They will unravel!"
"No," Mary whispered. "They'll live."
The room buckled under the pressure.
Each reflection in the mirror shattered—replaced by glowing windows into new futures.
In one, Mary lived as a mortal queen.
In another, Loosie became a traveling storyteller.
In another, the Codex was passed on—not as a weapon, but a seed.
The Archivist faltered.
"Unwritten stories are dangerous," he gasped.
"And written endings aren't always true," Mary replied.
With one final stroke, she wrote:
"And so the Codex was returned—not to a single hand, but to many."
The floating quill cracked.
The blood-ink dissolved.
The Archivist screamed—and then faded, his body unraveling into footnotes and ellipses.
Silence.
Then breath.
Real breath.
Loosie staggered, laughing breathlessly. "Well, damn."
Lela fell to one knee, her sword vanishing into mist. "Is it over?"
Mary looked down at the Codex.
Its pages were quiet.
Not closed—just still. Waiting.
"I think," she said slowly, "it's finally ours again."