Stage Six didn't begin.
It emerged.
Not like a door opening — but like a tide rolling back to reveal something ancient hiding in the sand.
The Engine faded. The lattice of symbols dimmed. The divine interface that moments ago had pulsed with infinite choices now dissolved, leaving behind a silence that didn't feel empty…
…It felt watched.
Iloba noticed first.
She tilted her head, braid of copper threads humming with alert tension. "Do you feel that?"
Kelechi did.
Not a sound. Not a movement.
But a presence — slow and vast and patient.
Something beneath even the Garden's Engine.
"We shouldn't be here," Nnadozie murmured. "This isn't part of the structure. This is beneath the blueprint."
"Beneath the blueprint?" Kelechi echoed. "How can that even exist?"
Iloba's face was grim. "Because before the Garden was ever a design… before the first thread was ever spun… something had to dream the loom."
The floor beneath them was now translucent.
Not glass — but memory.
It showed glimpses of timelines long dead, echo-versions of the Garden that never bloomed, failed iterations and corrupted arcs — narratives that never found structure, drifting like cosmic debris.
Below it all was a single point of darkness.
A void with shape.
A silence with gravity.
It pulsed — once.
And the world winced.
"What is that?" Kelechi whispered.
Nnadozie didn't speak. Iloba only answered with two words:
"The Rootless One."
The name struck like a bell.
Not in the ears — but in the thread.
Kelechi staggered, clutching his head as his crimson-silver line flared, then dimmed like a wounded heartbeat.
"That name— it knows me," he gasped.
Iloba reached to steady him. "Not you. Your role. The Story Weaver. It's the one narrative class that survived first contact with the Rootless One and lived to tell of it."
"And the others?"
"They got folded."
The void pulsed again.
A ripple of un-thread moved through space — not breaking reality, but unbinding it.
One by one, the structures around them lost definition.
The sky pixelated. The light slowed down. Nnadozie's shadow curled upward and began to whisper things he hadn't said.
"We're being unwritten," Iloba warned.
Kelechi forced his footing. "So how do we fight it?"
"You don't fight a rootless truth," Nnadozie said quietly. "You either rewrite it…"
"…or let it write you."
Iloba's eyes locked with Kelechi's.
"You have the Architect's thread now. That gives you one weapon."
"What?"
She pointed at the darkness below.
"Narrative contradiction."
That was the first rule the Garden had taught him.
Every story has structure.
Beginning → Conflict → Growth → Choice → Change → End.
But this thing — the Rootless One — was the absence of all that.
It had no narrative.
It fed on unfinished stories, threads cut too soon, roles abandoned mid-act, and memories that didn't fit the plot.
And now that Kelechi had altered the story of the Garden itself, he'd drawn the thing's attention.
Because if stories could be rebuilt…
Then endings could be rejected.
That made him dangerous.
And interesting.
To something hungry.
The floor cracked.
Beneath them, the darkness stretched wider — and from it rose hands.
They were not claws, or flesh, or bone. They were conceptual.
Fingers made of metaphor. Palms of pure rejection.
And from those hands emerged a mouth.
No lips. Just an opening — too wide, too slow — that spoke in negative space.
"Your story is fatally recursive."
"You have overwritten your own origin."
"You are not valid."
Kelechi's thread dimmed again.
But he stood tall.
"That's the point," he said. "I am the thread that shouldn't exist."
He reached up — and from the air, pulled a blade of narrative light from his own spine.
Then, without flinching, he plunged it into the floor.
The glass-memory beneath them shattered.
And they fell.
Not through space. Not through time.
Through possibility.
They landed in a garden.
Not The Garden.
The First One.
It was still forming — flowers of unrefined concept, trees that grew arcs of potential, paths paved in raw plot threads.
Everything here glowed with origin.
Iloba gasped. "This is the dream before the first edit."
Nnadozie looked pale. "The Rootless One has dragged us back to the seedbed."
Kelechi's eyes widened.
Because it was here.
No longer hidden.
No longer beneath.
It stood among the forming trees — a shape made of cancellation. A walking erasure. Its edges flickered like it refused to be defined, and where it stepped, stories froze — their potential locked in stasis.
The Rootless One turned its blank gaze toward him.
And spoke a final time.
"Create. And be erased."
"Or leave. And remain unwritten."
Iloba turned to him. "You can't give it a story."
"But if I leave—"
"It will wait," Nnadozie said. "For the next you. Or the next. It doesn't age. It doesn't forget."
Kelechi looked at his thread.
It was trembling.
But not with fear.
With decision.
"I don't have to write it a story," he said quietly.
"I can write it a mirror."
He raised his hand — and began to weave.
Not a plot.
Not a path.
Not a prophecy.
Just a single page.
And on it, he wrote a line:
"You exist without purpose. I exist because I chose one."
The Rootless One stopped.
For the first time… it hesitated.
Its edges stuttered. The frozen stories behind it twitched — then breathed.
Because the one thing it had never been shown was definition.
And the one thing it had never given… was choice.
Kelechi stepped forward, thread burning.
He placed the page into the Rootless One's core — and left it.
No fight.
No war.
Just the truth.
A story not told about the void.
A story told to it.
And as he walked away, the Rootless One did not follow.
It simply… read.
And for the first time in uncountable ages… it did not consume.
It wondered.
The garden shimmered.
The Origin peeled back.
And the true Garden — the living one — began to re-form above them.
Kelechi turned to Nnadozie and Iloba.
His thread was now solid midnight, with streaks of white and copper and crimson — woven with all their strands.
"Is it done?" he asked.
Iloba nodded, almost breathless. "No. But it's begun."
Nnadozie smiled.
"You've made the Garden question its own ending. That's more than anyone ever has."
Above them, a new tree began to grow — its trunk split, its leaves shimmering with unfinished sentences.
A place where stories could evolve without control.
A space for the unexpected.