[POV: Ezekiel]
The corridor narrowed as they descended. Not just in width—but in definition.
At first, the stone walls lost their inscriptions. Then their color. Then texture.
Soon, they walked not on floor, but on presence.
The world here had not been fully described. It existed by momentum, not by rule.
Ezekiel's footsteps didn't echo. Ilhera's breath didn't fog. Sound stopped behaving. Light hesitated.
It was a place beyond written space.
Ilhera slowed.
> "We're at the edge."
Ezekiel nodded.
> "Of what?"
> "Of where the Archive ends, and the Below begins. This isn't Watcher-territory anymore."
> "Then who writes what happens here?"
Ilhera swallowed.
> "No one. That's the problem."
---
They passed into the void of unwritten matter.
Their surroundings became suggestion—blurred hallways that shifted when not looked at directly. Occasionally, something scrawled across the air in chalk-like smoke: a partial glyph, a scratched-out thought.
Ezekiel reached a hand toward one.
> "Don't," Ilhera said quickly. "That one still remembers being a scream."
---
The tunnel finally opened into a ledge. Below it: a yawning chasm, wide and impossible. Floating stones drifted without gravity. On the far side: a single staircase made of mismatched stone blocks.
Ilhera let out a slow breath.
> "That's the stair."
> "Where does it go?"
> "Down."
> "To Below?"
> "To the part of Below that still cares what you name it."
---
They stepped forward together.
Ezekiel felt the Archive finally vanish behind them.
And with it, something inside him let go of breath he'd never drawn.
They were no longer inside the story the world had written.
They were walking into one no one had dared to begin.