The Archive of the Unwritten collapsed around them. Shelves buckled, their contents vanishing into swirling voids of ink and dust. The air itself seemed to crack, like glass under immense pressure, distorting reality in ways Klein had never seen before—even in the depths of the fog, even in the madness of an Unbound Book.
Klein gritted his teeth as he grabbed Yeaia's flickering hand.
"Move!"
Their surroundings twisted, the floor beneath them shifting into endless pages, words unraveling and rearranging before their very eyes. Klein could feel it—the pull of something immense, something ancient, something furious.
This was no ordinary collapse.
This was a punishment.
A rejection.
A refusal to let them leave.
Yeaia stumbled beside him, their mismatched eyes darting across the disintegrating landscape. Their form flickered, unsteady, as if they were still unsure whether they truly existed. Klein felt it too—the unnatural weight of a story that wasn't meant to be, a dream that had been forgotten yet refused to fade.
"There!" Yeaia pointed ahead, their voice sharp.
A fissure had opened in the distance—a tear in the Archive's fabric, an exit into the unknown. It pulsed with light, shifting unpredictably between different colors, different realities. Klein didn't hesitate.
They ran.
Behind them, the Archive howled. Books screamed as their pages burned into oblivion, words swallowed by the void. Ink-black chains lashed out from the darkness, grasping at them, trying to pull them back into the depths of a rewritten fate.
Klein summoned his spirituality, forming a protective layer around himself and Yeaia. The moment the chains touched the shimmering light surrounding them, they recoiled with a shriek, retreating into the depths of the Archive.
"It doesn't want us to leave," Yeaia murmured.
Klein's mind raced. The Archive wasn't just falling apart—it was rewriting itself. The loops, the distortions, the shifting pages—someone, or something, was controlling it.
"Then let's make sure we do."
With a final push, they lunged into the fissure.
—
The Moment of Awakening
Silence.
Klein's breath came in shallow gasps as he landed hard on cold stone. His vision swam, his senses struggling to adjust. The suffocating presence of the Archive was gone—but something else had replaced it.
He blinked.
A vast, ruined landscape stretched before him. Shattered towers reached for a sky that no longer existed, their spires broken, suspended in the air as if time itself had been severed. The ground was cracked and uneven, veins of faint, glowing ink running through it. And above—
A swirling mass of pages.
Countless, endless pages, spiraling in the void, their contents unreadable, their meanings shifting like the tides of an unseen force. Klein's mind reeled. This wasn't the real world.
It wasn't the Archive, either.
It was something in-between.
A place that should not exist.
Beside him, Yeaia stirred. Their form was steadier now, though they still flickered slightly at the edges. They looked up at the sky of shifting pages, eyes dark with understanding.
"We're still inside it," they murmured. "This isn't reality. It's… the dream's core."
Klein exhaled sharply.
"The dream?"
Yeaia nodded slowly, their gaze distant.
"The Dream That Waits."
Klein stilled. That name again. It had been whispered in the Archive, written on the fragment he had found, lingering in the corners of his mind.
"What is it?" he asked carefully.
Yeaia's expression was unreadable.
"A story that was never meant to be written."
A chill ran through Klein's spine. He understood now—this wasn't just about escaping a broken loop, or undoing an overwritten fate.
This was something older, something deeper.
Something that had been waiting.
"Then we find the ending," Klein said, straightening. "And we wake up."
Yeaia turned to him, their mismatched eyes glowing faintly.
"If we can."
The ruins stretched endlessly before them, the sky of pages above shifting with unseen whispers.
The dream was not over yet.
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End of Chapter 80
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