The road had no road.
It wasn't paved. It wasn't dirt. It wasn't even narrative.
It was suggested – an editorial ellipsis scribbled across the border between chapters. A margin between myth and manuscript, where footnotes gathered like mold in the silence.
Echo stepped lightly, ink threads coiling faintly beneath his boots. Curata walked a few paces behind, blades quiet. Ash brought up the rear, hood pulled low as he watched the border of the Canon curl and flicker like burnt paper.
"Where are we?" Ash finally asked.
"Outside structure," Echo replied. "The Canon doesn't fully write this place. It only acknowledges it... footnote by footnote."
Above them, the sky was pale and cracked, like someone had highlighted it in too many edits. Words flickered across it – author comments, redlines, citation marks, dangling metaphors long since deleted.
A breeze carried half-sentences on its back.
"...referred to again only in the Second Draft..."
"...see Appendix V for original confrontation..."
Curata's jaw tightened. "These are editorial notes. Dangerous ones. Some of them bite."
Ash scoffed. "Bite?"
Before Echo could answer, a floating note drifted close to Ash's shoulder.
"Irrelevant side character, prone to mood shifts. Consider cutting for pace."
It stuck to him.
Ash tore it off – but for a moment, his form flickered. Transparent. Reduced.
Then he snarled and tossed the note aside, which burst into comma-shaped sparks.
"Okay," he muttered. "Noted."
The path narrowed as they entered the deeper Margin. The world grew thinner. Words failed to land. Dialogue curled back into their throats. Even Echo's ink stopped humming.
Curata whispered, "We're close."
"To what?"
"The Archive."
Echo's reply was almost reverent. "The place where stories go when they're half-born and half-buried."
"Or never told at all," she added.
Before them, a structure emerged.
Not a building. Not a ruin.
A shelved landscape – hilltops stacked like chapters, valleys lined with epilogues, trees with bark made of blurred references.
But between them – there was something moving.
Echo froze.
It wasn't a Compiler.
It wasn't a Censor.
It was thin. Crooked. Wreathed in punctuation marks like armor. Its limbs were made of quotation fragments. Its face was a long line of asterisks. Its fingers clicked as they moved, each one a footnote number searching for context.
Curata hissed, "A Footnote Warden."
Ash blinked. "That's not real."
"They patrol editorial space. They aren't written. They're assigned."
The Warden tilted its head at them. A citation bubble appeared over its shoulder.
"Query: Authorship status of Echo, Curata, and Ash. Result: Unknown annotation vector."
Then it spoke.
Not aloud.
In reference format.
"Unindexed presence detected. Initiate recursive search. Cross-validate legitimacy."
Echo's ink flared.
But it wasn't defence.
It was eager.
It wanted to write.
It pulled on his fingers, urging him forward – not to attack, but to annotate.
The Warden stepped closer.
"Define yourselves. Tag origin. Declare primary arc."
Ash reached for his blade. "I don't think it wants small talk."
"Don't attack," Echo whispered.
"Why not?"
"Because that gives it structure."
The Warden lifted its hand. Quotation marks snapped open like jaws. A redline shot toward Echo.
Echo raised his palm – and his ink moved before he did.
It caught the redline in midair and rewrote it.
"Query withdrawn. Source unreliable. Archive deferment granted."
The Warden staggered. Glitched. Its annotations fluttered.
Ash stared. "Did you just bluff an editorial system?"
"No," Echo said softly. "I wrote a new interpretation of its protocol."
Curata was quiet. "Your ink isn't just reactive anymore."
"I know."
The Warden twitched once, then retracted.
It turned into a footnote symbol – just a little superscript [1] – and vanished into the wind.
They continued through the Archive.
Half-finished stories curled on stone shelves like fossilized scrolls. Echo reached out, touching one. It pulsed – a tale of a girl made entirely of questions, whose arc was cancelled mid-chapter.
He let go.
"Don't get lost in the forgotten," Curata warned. "This place remembers what you forget."
Ash kicked a footnote marker aside. "So now what?"
Echo looked ahead.
Toward a hollow in the center of the Archive.
A small stone pedestal.
And on it – a page.
One page.
Flickering between story and rebuttal. One second a prophecy, the next a critique.
He stepped closer.
It didn't speak.
It listened.
Then, it began writing back.
Not in text. Not in voice.
But in feeling.
A single phrase pulsed in his mind.
"What you write next will cost you something you still love."
He paused.
Then, he reached out anyway.