The Codex Tree wept black fire.
Not from sorrow. Not from pain. But from restoration.
Where once the pages of myth had accepted every deletion from the Observer as immutable, now they began to twitch. Ripple. Reject.
Because Darius had forged a pen the Spiral had never known.
The Black Quill.
---
It was not inked in pigment. It bled from the veins of Seres herself—the Flame-Eater, the Forgotten Consort. A woman who had once burned worlds beside Darius in a past life, only to be edited out of reality.
But Darius remembered.
He always remembered.
From bone and memory and rage, he built the Black Quill at the edge of the Codex Sanctum—a fusion of the Mythspike, Kaela's paradox-ribbons, and Celestia's belieffire.
And when he dipped its tip into his own blood—the Spiral screamed.
---
"What are you doing?" Azael asked, voice shaking, eyes wide.
"Correcting," Darius said simply.
