The silence after Damien's sacrifice was worse than the storm.
Ink rain still fell, but it no longer hissed against fire—it simply pooled quietly around Clara's feet. The void's walls quivered, trembling as though unsure if they should collapse or endure. Even Evelyn, usually drunk on chaos, fell quiet, her serpentine eyes glittering with something between awe and hunger.
Clara stood trembling in the center of it all. Half her body was flesh—fragile, human, scarred with burns and cuts. The other half was parchment and quill, words crawling across her skin like living veins. Her left eye was human, brown and glistening with tears. Her right eye was a moving sentence, letters shifting in endless loops.
And when she spoke, her voice was not hers.
"…Damien is gone," she whispered, but it came layered with another tone—cold, vast, patient, like pages turning in an infinite library. "Erased. Not rewritten. Removed."
The words sent a ripple through the void. The Author's decree had been defied, and the universe seemed unsure how to reconcile it.
Yurin's gaze sharpened. He studied her not with pity, not with grief, but with a scholar's fascination, his crimson aura glowing faintly brighter. He stepped closer, boots echoing softly against nothing. "Removed. That word is… troublesome. You shouldn't exist like this."
Clara's human hand clenched, pressing against her chest where Damien's final embers had entered her. She trembled, as if something inside was still burning. "I don't… I don't know who I am anymore. I can hear him—his fire, his voice. But I can't feel him." Her eyes darted upward, toward the fracture in the sky. "And I can hear… it."
The Author's presence pressed against them, heavy as gravity, though silent for now.
Evelyn tilted her head, her voice almost gleeful again. "Oh, what a gift he's left you with, little scholar. Half woman, half scripture, half void's mistake. Tell me—does it hurt? Or is it delicious?"
Clara flinched, the Codex half of her face twisting as quills erupted from her shoulder, writhing like broken wings. She fell to her knees, gripping her head. "It's both… it's—"
Her words fractured into screams as sentences burst from her mouth, spilling into the air as glowing script, each line hovering for a moment before dissolving. They weren't commands. They weren't spells. They were fragments of memory.
> "Damien, don't you dare light a fire in here!"
"If the world is ending, then I'm ending it with you."
"Your flames are loud, but your heart is louder."
The voices weren't the Codex's—they were hers. Pure, human Clara.
Evelyn clapped with delighted cruelty. "Ah, she bleeds her own story! Pages of flesh unspooling into the void!"
But Yurin didn't laugh. His calm broke just slightly, unease crawling beneath his mask of serenity. "This… shouldn't be possible. A page cannot hold two inks. And yet…" His eyes flickered with a rare glint of curiosity—and fear. "The Author is not erasing her."
That silence above was the most terrifying thing. The fracture in the void widened, as if the Author was watching and… waiting.
Clara gasped, clutching her chest tighter, her parchment skin cracking further. "It's not me. It's Damien. He's… in me. Not alive. Not dead. Just… erased, and yet here." She lifted her face, eyes wild with terror. "Yurin, what happens when fire burns the script itself?"
For the first time, Yurin didn't answer immediately. His crimson glow pulsed faintly, his lips parting as though weighing the truth against the consequences of speaking it. Finally, he said quietly:
"…Then the story unravels."
The void groaned at the words, the black storm convulsing. Pages tore themselves from the walls of nothing, dissolving before they could land. Clara collapsed fully to the ground, half her body twitching like a broken marionette, the other half radiating words that kept rewriting themselves, unstable and self-contradictory.
"I can't hold it…" she whispered, her human eye begging for help. "He's burning everything. Inside me, outside me… Damien is—"
She stopped, body convulsing, and her right eye flared with script. A different voice spoke through her, calm and alien.
"Erasure is infection. One ember can unmake a library. If you do not silence it… all will collapse."
The Author was speaking through her now.
Evelyn hissed, enthralled. "So the great quill in the sky does notice after all…"
Yurin's eyes narrowed. His calm mask cracked just slightly, revealing something colder beneath. He stepped closer to Clara, crouching before her trembling form. His hand hovered inches from her face, crimson aura glowing.
"You carry something impossible," he said softly, almost kindly. "You are half unwritten, Clara. You shouldn't be here. And yet you are."
Her human side looked at him with desperate hope. "Then help me…"
Her script side glared at him with infinite contempt. "Kill me, Architect."
Yurin's hand hovered in the balance, his shadow falling over her broken form. Evelyn leaned in eagerly, whispering, "Yes… yes… which side will you save, Yurin Crimson? The girl? The Codex? Or neither?"
The void stilled, waiting.
And Yurin finally smiled again, though it wasn't gentle. It was the smile of someone who had already made the choice long before it was spoken.
He whispered, so only Clara could hear:
"…Why not both?"