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Chapter 2 - The Sentence

For weeks after the spiral appeared in the sky, Liora avoided speaking the Word.

She tried not to think about it. She kept her lips sealed when the wind whispered, when the shadows leaned toward her, when the stars rearranged themselves like eyes following her from above.

But silence was not enough.

It began in dreams. She would find herself in a room without walls, standing on a floor made of rippling glass. Above her, a voice would murmur a fragment of something — a piece of a sentence. She could never remember the beginning, only the last syllable: the Word.

Each night the sentence grew longer.

By the seventh dream, it was clear: she wasn't the one creating the changes in reality. She was finishing something else's sentence.

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The Stranger

On the eighth night, she woke to find a man sitting in her chair by the fire. His coat dripped snow, but no snow had fallen that night.

> Liora: "Who are you?"

Stranger: "A listener."

His voice was quiet, measured, as though each word was weighed before being spoken.

> Stranger: "Every time you whisper, you give it more shape. The Sentence isn't done yet, but when it is…"

He trailed off, studying the flames.

Liora: "What will happen?"

Stranger: "There will be no difference between thought and world. Between desire and existence. Between you and it."

Her mouth went dry.

> Liora: "It? What is 'it'?"

The stranger's gaze flicked to the window. Outside, the snow was falling upward.

Stranger: "The author."

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The Temptation

For days afterward, Liora tried to live normally. She chopped wood, she fed the goats, she mended her clothes. But reality itself kept intruding — the taste of honey in her water when she hadn't added any, the sudden blooming of frost roses on her windows, the sky turning an unnatural shade of silver at dusk.

The Word wanted to be spoken.

One night, she found herself at the edge of the forest, the parchment from her grandmother's attic clutched in her hand. The script in the margin had changed. No longer just the Word — now there were two words.

The beginning of the Sentence.

Her heart hammered. She could speak it now, finish the fragment.

Somewhere in the dark, the wind whispered:

Just one more… and we will be whole.

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