The library was still collapsing. Not physically—no, that part had already happened, quite enthusiastically. This collapse was subtler. More existential. More… grammatical.
Sentences bled from the walls. Paragraphs oozed down the stairwells in broken loops. Somewhere, a chapter title screamed as it was forcibly conjugated in seven tenses simultaneously.
A comma floated past Rafael's ear like a lost thought. He didn't flinch. He was used to punctuation trauma by now.
"Okay," he said slowly, watching Bryn drag a semi-conscious Footnote through a semi-colon storm, "so the library's become hostile to narrative cohesion. Again."
Bryn's face was illuminated by the flicker of syntax-fire. "Hostile? It just tried to reassign my pronouns to third-person omniscient with unreliable modifiers."
Rafael winced. "That's… aggressive."
"I almost narrated my own death by foreshadowing," Oren added.
They ducked behind a toppled stack of pre-collapse lore scrolls. One burst into flame. The flame burst into a footnote. The footnote screamed something about passive voice and imploded.
Rafael scanned what remained of their surroundings. The Root Index (formerly a pillar of narrative order) was a molten heap of contradictions and strikethroughs. Where a corridor had once led to the Table of Continuities, there now sat a recursive metaphor looped into a Möbius pun.
And worse—Mo had not yet rebooted.
The System's presence, once a constant tinnitus of snark in Rafael's mind, was eerily absent. No notifications. No death achievements. Not even an unsolicited update about his digestive health.
Just after their appearance!
That wasn't just wrong. That was apocalyptic.
"Bryn," he whispered, pressing his hand against a nearby glyph-smeared wall. "We're narratively unsupervised."
"I noticed," she grunted, slapping away a paragraph trying to describe her mood inaccurately. "The metaphors are drunk and the similes have unionized."
A fresh burst of golden sparks crackled from the ruined center of the library. The Patch Node. Rafael's intended destination before everything went postmodern, still pulsed. It was corrupted now. Glitching visibly. The font had started cycling between serif and sans-serif in a way that made his eyes itch.
A whisper crawled out of the glow: "Syntax Error: Unexpected Hero Detected."
Rafael grimaced. "Yep. It sees me."
"Then go," Bryn said, shoving him toward the glow. "Patch it."
"Patch it with what? My self-esteem? I haven't had a stable identity update since Loop 4!"
She held up a data spike with one hand and a lemon-glazed dagger with the other. "Fake it. Rewrite it. Just stop it from unraveling the canon. Just treat everything happened here as fillers."
Rafael sighed and stepped toward the Node.
Each step felt like walking through increasingly bad drafts. First came the typo fog. Words that shouldn't exist swirling around his feet: ambiguinous, nostalgarchy, unremorselfish. Then the loose ideas, the "what-ifs" discarded in earlier timelines, now feral. A discarded sidekick clung to his ankle briefly, begging for relevance.
Finally, the Node.
It hung midair. A perfect cube of hypertext, glitching at its edges like it couldn't decide what metaphor to use. One side displayed a cascading code log:
> [REBOOT_CHAIN [CHAPTER 93–94]: OVERLAP DETECTED.]
[GODLINE(?): UNDEFINED BEHAVIOR.
PROTAGONIST_ID = RAFAEL_VAGATHRIS // TOO_MUCH_SNARK_EXCEPTION.
PATCH_PENDING...]
[...]
> [AUTHORSHIP NULL.]
Rafael touched it.
The world stuttered.
***
He stood in a void made of blank pages. Endless, stretching, boundless paper. No ink. No plot. No constraints.
And something was waiting.
A shadow loomed in the white expanse, pixelated around the edges. It didn't walk. It didn't move. It asserted presence the way a statement does in the middle of an argument you didn't realize you were losing.
"You aren't the Author," it said.
"No," Rafael replied, jaw clenched. "But I'm what's left."
The entity blinked—if absence of structure can blink. "This narrative is collapsing. The Godline was overused. Too many metaphors. Too many layers. Too many fillers."
"Too many truths," Rafael whispered. "You're afraid of clarity."
"We're afraid of conclusion."
That, Rafael understood. Because endings hurt. He took a breath. Closed his eyes.
And typed.
> [DEFINE RAFAEL_VAGATHRIS:]
[A hero by accident.]
[A coward by choice.]
[A survivor by necessity.]
[A glitch by design.]
The paper bled ink. The world cracked. The shadow flinched.
> [DEFINE BRYN:]
[A weapon crafted by doubt.]
[A mind honed by loss.]
[A heart stitched from sidequests.]
> [DEFINE MIRA:]
[A Performer birthed by loneliness]
[A chanting between hollow]
[A laugh between cry]
> [DEFINE LIRA:]
[A mage who spoke the unspoken]
[A leyflux-wielder who ever doubt]
[A knitter who knitted words and reality]
> [DEFINE OREN:]
[A soldier who saved his comrades]
[A man who erased his tears by smiles]
[A walking comic relief of this story]
> [DEFINE JUNO:]
[A bard who once forgot how to sing]
[A lover who once forgot about her lover]
[A singer who once singing a tragedy]
[Rafael's True Anchor]
The entity screamed in unreadable HTML.
> [SYSTEM REBOOT: PATCH INITIATED.]
[REASSERT AUTHORSHIP.]
[INSERT: CHOICE.]
And in the moment the entity lunged—
—Rafael deleted it.
With a single keystroke: Backspace.
***
Reality snapped back like a rubber band.
The Node stabilized. Mo's voice reinitialized inside his skull:
[Welcome back. Patch #9.4 applied. Filler stabilized. Coffee restored. Please enjoy responsibly.]
He collapsed backward into Bryn's arms. "It's done."
"For now," she said.
"God, I hate literary mechanics!" Rafael cursed in honorifics.
She smiled faintly. "You're getting better at them."
The library's ruins began to reconstitute—less orderly, maybe, but alive again.
And somewhere, in the distance, a new chapter loaded.
***