The fissure screamed.
Not a sound the ear could hold—more like a thought splitting in half and spilling across every living mind in Arden Gate. The square rippled with the weight of it. The baker clutched his head and dropped his half-burnt loaf into the dirt. Maren seized Kito by the shoulders, but the boy's grin froze, locked between laughter and silence.
Every building, every stone, every breath of air seemed caught between happening and not.
Above them, the fused mass of the four Narrativeless writhed. They were no longer fragments of hollow, loop, wait, or time. They had become something heavier, wider. The Storyless One bent over the town like a shadow too large to understand. Its form convulsed, torn between storyless and witnessed, cracked by Lio's last desperate projection.
And then the ground split deeper.
The third finger rose.
