The chamber behind them no longer pulsed with light. The scroll had vanished, its final message etched only into memory. Finn stood at the edge of the circular window that opened into nothing no sky, no walls, only the kind of black that swallowed sound. He didn't know how deep it went, or what waited beyond, but he knew it was the way forward.
He turned to the reader. Her face was pale, her brow damp. She held the last blank scroll in her arms like a relic, though neither of them had spoken since the words had burned themselves into the void.
To walk forward is to write.
They stepped into the dark.
There was no bridge. No tunnel. Only air, weightless and cold. But each step held, as if the scroll itself remembered a path for them. The air was thick and soundless, the kind of quiet that made each heartbeat seem too loud. It reminded Finn of dreams where running felt like floating and falling was the only direction.
The first ten steps were easy. The next ten harder. The twentieth made Finn dizzy. The dark pressed closer, humming against his ribs like held breath. Time began to stretch. He couldn't tell how long they'd been walking. Minutes? Hours? Years?
Then the light returned.
Not above. Not around.
Inside.
It started in Finn's chest, just beneath the ribs, the way the scroll had once warmed against his skin. He looked to the reader and saw it in her too, just under her collarbone a glow, faint and flickering.
They were becoming something else.
Ahead, the black thinned. A shimmer appeared, like heat rising from stone. The shimmer formed into structure lines and angles like doors, like script, like a map half-finished.
Finn reached toward it.
The shimmer pulsed. It did not resist him.
The world fractured.
Not shattered. Just... shifted.
Suddenly he was somewhere else.
A courtyard.
Bright sun. Ivy curling over stone. A pool of still water reflecting a tower in the distance. The sound of wind and birds.
Finn blinked.
He was standing in the center of the courtyard, alone.
The reader was gone.
The scroll was gone.
He looked at his hands. Ink marked them. Not wounds. Not stains. Writing. Tiny letters in the cracks of his knuckles, across the veins.
"Where are you?" he called.
No answer.
He turned and saw a figure seated at the far end of the garden. A man, cloaked in deep blue, face hidden beneath a hood.
Finn approached.
The man didn't move.
But when Finn stood before him, the man looked up and Finn saw his own face.
Older. Wearier. Eyes like stone and fire.
The older Finn smiled faintly. "So. You made it."
Finn's breath caught. "What is this?"
"This," said the older version, "is what happens when you stop being written and start writing."
The courtyard wavered.
The reader appeared beside him, startled but whole.
The older Finn rose. "You have a choice now. Not the kind others give. The kind you give yourself."
Finn looked at the scrollmarks on his skin.
"Then what's next?" he asked.
The older Finn gestured to the water.
"Step in. See what you become."
Finn did.
The water accepted him.
And the writing began again.
The sensation was nothing like drowning. The water was memory, and stepping into it was like walking into a story that already knew your shape. It folded around him, whispering of things he hadn't done yet, people he had yet to meet, and choices still forming in the marrow of his bones.
He sank, but not downward. Through.
The courtyard faded, replaced by scenes stitched together by threads of silver ink. He stood beneath stars that bent inward. He walked through doors that opened from memory. He heard names he had never spoken but somehow knew were his.
And then, a hallway.
Stone. Simple. A wooden table with a single candle, its flame unmoving.
The reader stood there, waiting. Her clothes were different threaded with gold. Her eyes calmer.
"You took longer than me," she said.
Finn didn't ask how she got here. The place did not move by steps, only by will.
"I saw futures," he said.
She nodded. "So did I."
"Were any of them kind?"
She looked at the candle. "Some."
Finn stepped beside her. On the table lay a single quill.
"What's this?"
"The final act of passage," she said. "You must write one truth. Any truth. And then the next gate will open."
He stared at the quill. "And if I lie?"
"You don't leave."
Finn picked up the quill. It burned cold in his hand.
He closed his eyes.
Then he wrote:
I was afraid to matter.
The ink shimmered. The candle flared. The table folded away into light.
A door appeared in the wall.
And Finn stepped through it, not as the thief who stole fate.
But as the one who dared to rewrite it.