The outskirts of Veridian were a wound the city refused to acknowledge.
Beyond the gilded towers and narrative-stabilized zones lay a dead region—unwritten, unlit, and unwelcomed. Known in whispers as the Dead Chapters, it was a place where stories went to rot. Streets turned in on themselves. Time folded like damp parchment. And Kiran walked its edges with the lantern clutched tightly, its glow the only resistance against the creeping void.
Leon and Aria followed behind, silent. The battle with the Beast had left its scars: Leon limped slightly, the silver of his prosthetic arm dulled, and Aria hadn't spoken since waking from her trance. She kept glancing at Kiran when she thought he wasn't looking.
Because something about him had changed.
The wind in the Dead Chapters didn't howl. It whispered. Words, fragmented and meaningless, spoken in voices that sounded too familiar.
"They're not just erased stories," Selena murmured from the lantern. Her glow was dimmer, but her presence steady. "They're the remains of edits that failed. Realities that couldn't sustain themselves. The ink here is thick with rejection."
They passed a crumbling watchtower with glyphs carved in circles—scratched over by crude claw marks. Signs of something recent. Something hungry.
Kiran crouched near a broken door, fingers brushing the surface. Blood had soaked into the grain. Old, but not ancient. And in it: a symbol.
"This is a containment sigil," Leon said from behind. "Standard for high-threat Beast experiments. But this one's inverted."
"Someone was trying to let something out," Aria added. Her voice was raw. "Not keep it in."
The ground rumbled beneath them.
They followed the sound—downward through the cracked earth and into an underground passage lined with cables, torn manuscripts, and syringes filled with pulsing black fluid.
"This wasn't sanctioned," Selena said.
Leon kicked over a rusted table. "These bastards were breeding Beasts. Weaponizing them."
"Is that possible?" Kiran asked.
"Only with anchors," Aria whispered. She lifted a torn page from the floor. On it was a diagram of a fetus... with a Beast's spine.
"Gods," she whispered. "They weren't just binding Beasts to people. They were growing them inside human hosts."
Kiran stared at the walls, now lined with containment cells. Most were empty. Some were scorched. One still dripped.
Selena's voice was a hiss. "This is anti-narrative warfare. Beyond anything even the Editors allow. Whoever ran this place wasn't trying to control Beasts. They were trying to overwrite what it means to be one."
They entered the final chamber.
It was round, lit by nothing but flickering tubes embedded in the ceiling. Chains hung from hooks. The walls were covered in pages nailed down with bone. In the center, a corpse—no, a shell—knelt. Its chest was hollowed out, its spine connected to a pulsing obelisk of crystallized ink.
Leon stepped closer. "This was recent. Less than a week."
Then a voice echoed.
"Don't move."
Dozens of crimson crosshairs lit up across their bodies.
From the shadows emerged figures in ragged cloaks, each bearing weapons grafted from scrap and glyphsteel. Their leader—a woman with a burned-out eye and a Beast-scar running across her jaw—stepped forward.
"You don't belong here," she said.
Kiran raised his hands. "We're not with the Editors. We're here for the Node."
She looked at him long and hard. Then her eye drifted to the lantern.
"You carry the voice of the Traitor."
"Selena isn't—"
"She was one of us," the woman interrupted. "Until she broke the Accord and started playing with rewrite magic. You think the future she fights for will save us? It will erase us."
Leon stepped forward. "So what are you? Another cult with guns and opinions?"
The woman smirked. "We are The Null Order. Rebels. Survivors. And you just walked into our graveyard."
The floor beneath Kiran groaned.
Then screamed.
From below the obelisk, something woke.
The chains rattled. The lights died.
And a voice, not spoken but remembered, filled the room:
"I am the Beast who never found a page. The one denied even a death."
Kiran's shadow twisted on its own.