The duck had returned.
Not in a dramatic fashion. No chorus of trumpets. No strobe of golden light. Just a quiet quack and a ripple in causality that smelled faintly of cinnamon toast and déjà vu.
Rafael stared at it. The duck stared back, as if to say: 'Yes, it's me again. No, I don't have a user manual.'
"Is it… quantum or just rude?" he asked.
"I think it's both," Bryn replied, narrowing her eyes. "And possibly an allegory."
Before they could debate it further, the world around them shuddered. The Root Library's foundation groaned, adjusting like a spine cracking in irritation. Rafael barely had time to swear before a fresh portal shimmered open, not the kind the System generated. This one was jagged, flickering, and it smelled like a broken promise.
Bryn stepped in front of Rafael on instinct. The duck flapped its wings once, unimpressed, and waddled sideways into a pocket of unreality where gravity forgot what it was doing.
The portal belched out a figure.
Juno.
***
Juno's POV
Juno hit the ground in a three-point landing, skidding through fractured grammar and ghost metaphors. Her breath was ragged. Her metaphysical armor was cracked. Her eyes burned with starlight and unfinished sentences.
She rose slowly. One hand still clutched the temporal lance she'd stolen from a collapsing subplot. The other trembled, not from fear, from exhaustion. From everything she'd had to see on the other side of the void.
She spotted Rafael instantly. He looked tired. He always looked tired, anyway. She wanted to hug him. She wanted to punch him. Something within her began to sprout. Like the Rafflesia Arnoldi that blooms in the middle of nowhere.
Maybe later.
"You're late," she said.
He blinked. "I didn't know we were scheduled."
"Of course we were. Time made us a promise, remember?"
He didn't. But she did. And she was here to cash it in.
"I've seen it," she said.
"Seen what?"
Juno turned her gaze to the duck.
"The ending. The original one. The one before all the reboots."
The duck quacked again. It sounded solemn. Possibly sarcastic.
She looked back at Rafael. "It's still reachable. But only just. The System doesn't want us to find it. It's buried too deep in unstable lore and suppressed arcs. Too many fillers hovering around."
***
Meanwhile, Elsewhere — Lira's POV
Lira was tired of dreams.
They clung to her like spiderwebs; fragile, sticky, and full of things with too many legs. Every time she closed her eyes, she fell backward through broken perspectives. Through chapters that never were. Through kisses that hadn't happened and wars that hadn't ended.
And now, awake in the shadow of the Root Library, she wasn't even sure she was in the right version of herself.
But she had a job.
Lira adjusted the dials on her paradox compass. It shrieked once and pointed due-narrative.
"That way."
She strode forward.
The ground hummed with tension. Her name was out there again, folded in someone's prophecy. She could feel it.
And someone had just used the Brick.
That meant Rafael was alive. She herself didn't know how she oversimplified it to that conclusion.
And he in so much trouble. At least that was what she thought about.
But she wasn't alone.
***
Oren's POV
Oren had survived worse.
Probably.
The timeline had chewed him up, spit him out, then rolled him in dramatic irony for good measure. He emerged from a collapsing metaphor barely holding onto his soul and most of his left boot.
Still, his grip on the Enigmatic Ledger was tight (something he picked up some chapters ago behind the scene). The ledger contained all the unofficial annotations, the reader notes that hadn't been sanctioned by the System. It shouldn't exist. He shouldn't exist. But someone, somewhere, had written him back in.
He felt her before he saw her.
Lira.
She was standing ahead, her silhouette outlined in flickering scene direction. He approached carefully, uncertain if this was his version of her or not. It didn't matter.
She turned. "I was wondering when you'd catch up."
He smirked. "Time got confused. I had to convince it with math, sarcasm, and some chilli powder."
She laughed. It was tired and real.
Without a word, they began walking toward the convergence point together.
***
Meanwhile, Mira.
Mira didn't walk out of a portal. She clawed her way out of a metaphysical sinkhole lined with rejection letters and fan theory flame wars.
She coughed, spat out a dangling subplot, and stood up.
"I hate narrative recursion," she muttered.
A glowing breadcrumb trail hovered in the air, a literal trail of annotated footnotes leading toward the Root Library. She followed it, grumbling. The air grew thicker the closer she got, flavored with overripe tropes and unspoken character arcs.
When she saw the duck, she knew she was in the right place.
***
Back to Rafael
Rafael could barely process what Juno had just said.
"The original ending?" he asked.
Juno nodded. "The one the System keeps overwriting. The one we were supposed to reach."
"I thought that was erased."
"So did I. But apparently, it's archived. Deep in the Meta-Bureaucracy's forbidden stacks."
Bryn let out a low whistle. "Even the System can't purge those."
Juno took a deep breath. "There's a trail. A backdoor through continuity. But it's fragmented. We'll need Lira."
As if on cue, a shimmer of color tore sideways through the air. Lira stepped out of a breach in the fourth wall, paradox compass spinning wildly. Beside her, Oren emerged, clutching a book that glowed with dangerous intent.
"Miss me?" Lira asked.
"Constantly," Rafael said. "And irrationally."
Bryn elbowed him. Again.
Juno raised an eyebrow at Oren. "You made it."
Oren shrugged. "Wasn't much fun being dead. Or erased. Or both. But no, I picked it along the way."
Before anyone could speak again, the air twisted. Mira stepped out of the shimmering curl of trope debris and exhaled hard.
"You all look like a plot twist hit you in the face," she said.
"It did," Rafael said. "Several. And I think one of them married me in Loop 9 or something."
They laughed—a real, jagged laugh. One that stitched things back together.
The duck quacked once more, this time with purpose.
It began waddling toward the edge of the narrative map, where plotlines thinned and tone dissolved into ambiguity.
"Follow the duck," Juno said.
And this time, no one argued.
They walked together, six fragments of a story once broken. Behind them, the ruins of collapsed chapters. Ahead of them, the truth.
Not the truth the System wanted.
The original one.
***
[Narrated by the outer beings called The M*****h of B** S*****s]
[Welcome to my authority, dear readers. I hope you enjoy the winding fillers that I've painstakingly prepared.]
***
[Narrated by the outer beings called The S*****r]
[You know what, I can't do anything about this. It might be more accurate to say that I don't want to do anything about it. You know, you got my point. Just enjoy like I enjoyed this so far]
***