The crack beneath them widened. A great, gaping void, deeper than anything Klein had ever seen, spreading like a jagged wound across reality itself. The edges of the world trembled—not as if breaking, but as if being rewritten.
The Fool stood at its edge, unfazed, watching them with those impossible eyes. Klein could feel the weight of the gaze, something stretching beyond his understanding.
Then, without hesitation, The Fool stepped forward.
And fell.
Klein's breath caught, but no sound came when The Fool's body should have hit the abyss. Instead, he simply sank—like ink bleeding into paper, his form dissolving into the depths.
Yeaia didn't move. Their mismatched eyes locked onto the empty space where The Fool had stood, lips parted in silent thought.
Then—
A ripple.
A deep, shuddering force tore through the air.
The crack did not close.
Instead, something crawled out.
A hand.
Not human. Not divine. Not right.
Fingers formed of lines. Etched, half-erased, shifting mid-existence as if trying to decide what they were. Not flesh. Not ink. Not anything that should belong in a world bound by rules.
Klein's breath hitched. His body screamed at him to move, to run, but he couldn't.
Yeaia, too, remained still. Watching. Calculating.
Then—
A voice.
No, not a voice.
A thought. A whisper of something too ancient to be words, yet it carved itself into their minds with dreadful clarity.
"Do you think you are the ones reading this story?"
Klein's chest tightened. A terrible, suffocating pressure surrounded them, pressing into his skull, burrowing into his thoughts.
"Do you truly believe you are anything but written lines?"
The hand clawed its way higher.
The arm that followed was a mass of shifting, unfinished strokes, as if sketched but never completed. Klein could see symbols, fragments of letters, pieces of words floating across its formless surface.
A being made of narrative.
Something that had existed before the first sentence.
And it was crawling into their world.
Yeaia exhaled slowly. Not in fear, but in understanding.
"This," they whispered, "is the author."
Klein's heart stopped.
The thing holding the pen.
Not a metaphor. Not an idea.
It was real.
And now, it was here.
The Fool had been erased, pulled back into the ink, and now—
Something else was stepping forward.
The being lifted its head.
There was no face. Only a shifting, twisting void of words, swirling, writhing, changing between sentences.
And then, it spoke again.
"You were never meant to reach this far."
The moment the words touched the air—
The world collapsed.
—
A Loop.
—
A Loop.
—
A Loop.
—
Klein gasped, staggering forward.
His hands shook. His body ached. The space around him was...familiar.
No. Not again.
He turned sharply.
Yeaia stood beside him, their expression unreadable.
Klein's heart pounded in his chest. He clenched his fists, nails digging into his palms.
"We were just here," he muttered.
Yeaia nodded.
"Yes."
They both turned.
The crack in the ground was gone.
No Fool.
No abyss.
No Author.
The world had reset.
But Klein knew.
Yeaia knew.
This time, they remembered.
And that meant—
So did it.
From somewhere unseen, something watched.
The loop wasn't a mistake.
It was a warning.
Or worse—
A game.
And Klein had the distinct, horrible feeling that they had just reached the final chapter.
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End of Chapter 65.
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