But as the pilgrim passed the threshold of flame, something deeper than memory ruptured. Something noticed them.
It had not finished dying.
Beneath the ashes of the Erasure's collapse, a shard remained—buried not in resistance, but in refusal. A wound that would not scar, because it refused to heal.
That fragment twisted.
It did not call itself by any name.
But the Grove would come to remember it as The Unshaping Storm.
It did not rise like the Erasure, slow and devouring.
It burst—a calamity of anti-memory, of reversal turned ravenous.
Where the Erasure silenced, the Storm shattered. It unstitched meaning with every lurching breath, pulling not just what was hidden—but what had already been healed.
And it howled with the voice of every story forced to change shape just to survive.
---
The Breaking Sky
The Grove felt it first as a tremor in the Flame That Listens.
Then, the sky itself began to fray.
Not darken.
Fray.
