It began with a breath not taken.
A page never turned.
A name once whispered, then struck through by the hand of a desperate author.
They had called it many things—The Errata, The Nullscribe, The Quiet Between Pages—but all these were metaphors, insufficient for the truth of it.
Because it wasn't a character.
It wasn't a force.
It was the refusal to be told.
And now it woke.
In the deepest sublevels of the Garden, beyond even the bounds of memory, Elowen's act had triggered something unintended. The summoning of the Lost had thinned the ink between layers. And that thinning allowed the Footnote its first movement in eons.
Not much.
Just a flicker of its clause.
A punctuation-shiver across the margins of causality.
But it was enough.
Enough for it to begin dragging its denied context into light.
Above, Jevan reeled as the world tilted. The page in his hand blackened, its words liquefying, retreating into his veins.
