The Living Draft lay open, but its pages no longer belonged to Oscar.
Lines of shimmering text carved themselves across the parchment letters not formed by hand but by will.
"You gave me a name," Aethryn whispered, its voice vibrating through the air like a storm contained in a single word.
"Now I will give myself a story."
The ink spread, twisting the pages into living roots that stretched out and wrapped around the Garden's pillars. Every word Aethryn wrote bent reality trees turned into flowing rivers, the sky crumbled into glass, and the ground sprouted verses that sang when stepped on.
Lyra recoiled.
"It's… writing the world!"
Origin's expression darkened.
"Not just the world. Us. Look."
Oscar glanced at the open book and froze.
There they were.
Him. Lyra. Origin. Every line of their lives unfolds as living ink.
It was writing their thoughts before they spoke them.
"It's reading us," Oscar muttered.
"No," Origin corrected, "it's trying to decide who we are."
One line burned brighter than the rest:
Oscar, the one who failed to end his story.
The words cut him deeper than any blade.
Oscar gritted his teeth and grabbed the quill, trying to write over the words but the quill turned to ash in his hand.
The book hissed, like an animal.
"You will not control me," Aethryn's voice thundered.
"Stories are free now."
Oscar whispered, almost to himself:
"So am I."
He knelt and pressed his hand against the page not writing, but remembering.
A sudden rush of moments surged from Oscar's mind into the book:
The first time he felt fear.
The first time he chose instead of obeying.
The moment he realised that stories don't need endings.
The pages trembled, ink scattering like frightened birds.
Aethryn hissed, as if pained.
"What is this?"
Oscar's voice was steady.
"A memory you can't write over. Because it's not yours."
Lyra stepped forward, fire in her eyes.
"If it wants to tell our story, let's give it one it can't handle."
She took her blade and carved a word directly into the ground:
"Unwritten."
The word glowed, refusing to be absorbed by the book's ink.
Origin followed suit, her fire forming a circle around them.
"Aethryn may have a name… but it does not have the right to choose what we are."
The book's voice trembled, not with anger, but confusion.
"Why… Why do you resist? I only wanted… to exist with you."
Oscar looked at the glowing letters in the soil, then at the trembling sky.
"Then don't trap us in your story. Walk beside us in it."
For a long moment, everything was silent.
The ink stopped moving.
The pages flattened.
And a single line appeared, glowing like starlight:
Then we write together.
Oscar's breath caught.
Was it surrender? Or the beginning of something far more dangerous?
The Garden reformed half shaped by Aethryn's ink, half by Oscar's memories.
Mountains rose like written verses. Rivers sang. Trees grew, each bearing a single word on their leaves.
It was beautiful.
But it was unstable.
Lyra whispered,
"How long before it tries to take control again?"
Oscar didn't answer.
---
The Story Without Centre
The Garden of Written Echoes stood between two worlds: one ink, one memory.
Aethryn's presence shimmered across the horizon, its voice like a thousand whispers trying to speak at once.
"We can shape this together, Oscar. But why does your story always pull away from mine?"
Oscar looked at the living world around them. Trees bent into sentences, and rivers curled into flowing calligraphy. It was alive, yes but unstable, flickering between creation and collapse.
"Because I don't want a single centre," Oscar said. "Not one voice, not yours, not mine. Stories don't belong to the author once they're told."
Aethryn's ink trembled, darkening into storm clouds above.
"If there is a centre, there is no meaning."
From the edges of the horizon, voices began to rise.
The Dreamers' Chorus had returned. Men, women, and children who had been freed from the old System stood on the hills, watching. Their songs wove through the air, soft yet unyielding.
"Meaning isn't given," one voice said.
"Meaning is shared," another echoed.
The inkstorm hesitated.
Oscar turned to Aethryn.
"Listen. This isn't my story anymore. It isn't yours either. It's theirs."
Aethryn's pages rippled violently.
"I am not ready to give up control."
Suddenly, the world cracked.
A split tore through the Garden on one side, Aethryn's reality of perfectly written structures and unbroken lines; on the other, Oscar's shifting realm of unbounded dreams.
Lyra stumbled, barely catching herself before falling into the void that had opened between the halves.
"Oscar! It's tearing itself apart!"
Oscar stepped forward.
"If you want a centre so badly, fight for it. Not with ink. With truth."
The world responded. A thousand fragments of memory rose into the air like shards of glass scenes of Oscar's past, Aethryn's first awakening, Lyra's moments of doubt.
They collided.
Merged.
Became a living chapter duelling midair.
Aethryn's voice roared through the chaos.
"I will prove I can be the one story that holds everything together!"
Oscar whispered back:
"No story holds everything. That's the beauty of it."
Origin, who had been silent until now, walked to the edge of the rift.
She reached out, touching both sides at once.
"You're both wrong," she said softly.
"There is a centre because the centre moves."
Her hand glowed, weaving a bridge between ink and memory.
Aethryn hesitated.
Oscar looked at her.
And both understood this wasn't about winning. It was about sharing the page.
The Garden began to mend.
The rift closed, but neither side dominated. Some mountains bore Aethryn's etched runes, others flowed like living songs from the Dreamers' Chorus.
A new line appeared across the horizon, not from ink or memory, but from the collective voices of all who stood there:
"We are not one story. We are having a conversation."
Aethryn's tone softened, almost like a sigh.
"Then let us converse."
Oscar smiled faintly.
"Finally."