The city of shattered glass disintegrated around Klein, collapsing into dust and ink that swirled like a storm of forgotten words. He tried to move, but his body froze, his mind trapped between understanding and denial.
The Fool—the one before him—stood unchanged, unaffected by the crumbling reality. Their presence did not flicker anymore.
Because Klein had remembered them.
Because they were real again.
The dust swirled, reforming into pages—pages that were torn, pages that were blank, pages that bled with words that had been erased.
And for the first time, Klein saw them.
The corrections.
There were layers upon layers, each one overwriting the last.
One where he had never existed at all.
One where he had been replaced.
One where he had failed.
One where he had won, but at the cost of everything.
One where he had taken the throne that was never his to take.
And beneath them all—beneath the hundreds, the thousands of rewrites—
Was a story unfinished.
An ending that had been erased.
Klein's voice cracked as he forced out the words.
"…Who are you?"
The Fool—his reflection, yet not—tilted their head.
"You already know," they said simply.
Klein's fingers twitched. His skin felt wrong, as if it didn't quite belong to him anymore.
He took a step forward—and the city rewrote itself.
Glass buildings reassembled. Streets reformed. The ink sky hardened back into parchment.
The loop had begun again.
Klein staggered back.
"No—no, wait!"
But it was too late.
The Fool had never moved.
They had never spoken.
They had never existed.
Except—
Klein remembered them.
He clenched his teeth. His mind rebelled against the reset, refusing to be rewritten.
"You…" His breath was shallow. "You were erased. Why?"
The Fool looked at him—truly looked at him.
And Klein felt it.
A crack in reality.
A moment of hesitation in the correction.
Because someone had asked a question that should never have been spoken aloud.
"Because," the Fool said softly, "I was the first mistake."
—
The First Mistake
The world shuddered.
The pages of reality trembled, the sky darkening as the ink of rewritten history bled into existence.
The Fool stepped forward.
Their presence was impossible—not an illusion, not a memory, but something that should not be.
And Klein understood.
They had been erased.
Not because they had failed.
Not because they had lost.
But because they had been the wrong answer.
Because their existence itself had been a contradiction—one that the world had tried, again and again, to correct.
But now—
Now, Klein had seen them.
And something that was remembered could never be fully erased.
The Fool reached out.
And for the first time, Klein saw their face.
His own—but not.
There was something off.
The edges of their features blurred.
Their eyes were mismatched, but the colors shifted, like ink being rewritten over and over.
Their voice was his, but layered with thousands of others—
Other versions of himself.
Other Kleins that had lived and died in stories that had been erased.
Other Fools who had been corrected before they could reach their ending.
And this one—
This one had resisted.
This one had survived.
Klein's stomach twisted. "What… do you want?"
The Fool smiled.
It was not a kind smile.
It was not a cruel one.
It was the smile of a being who had been forgotten for far too long.
"You already know," they whispered.
And Klein did.
They wanted to be remembered.
They wanted their story back.
They wanted their ending.
The Fool's fingers brushed against Klein's own.
And the moment they touched—
The world collapsed.
—
The Archive of Unwritten Endings
Klein's eyes snapped open.
He was not in the city of glass anymore.
Not in the abyss.
Not in the Fool's domain.
Not anywhere he had ever been before.
He stood in an endless library.
Shelves towered above him, stretching beyond the limits of sight.
Books lined every wall, bound in leather, parchment, metal, ink—some of them alive, some of them still being written.
And above—
Above, suspended in the air—
Was a single, unwritten page.
Blank.
Waiting.
Klein took a step forward. His breath felt too loud in the silence.
And then—
The page moved.
Ink bled across its surface, writing itself in real-time.
He watched—horrified, entranced, helpless.
The words formed a story.
A story that should not exist.
A story that had been erased—
Yet refused to be forgotten.
A story of a Fool that was never supposed to be.
And Klein—
Klein realized with a sickening clarity.
This was his story.
This was their story.
And for the first time—he saw the real ending.
And it was—
Blank.
---
End of Chapter 68.
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