At first, nothing seemed to change.
The tower faded. The sky remained still. The silence around them held its shape.
But Echo could feel it.
The air had acquired weight. Not pressure, exactly. Something stranger. Like the pause between a question and its answer. Like the white space before a sentence begins.
Curata didn't speak. She had one hand on the hilt of her ink blade, the other resting flat against the ground.
Ash stood a few feet away, eyes narrowed, shoulders tense. "Tell me I'm not imagining it," he muttered.
"You're not," Curata replied. "The Canon's breathing."
Echo blinked. "What does that mean?"
Curata looked at him, and for the first time in their journey, there was real fear behind her eyes.
"It means the world's no longer rendering automatically. It's watching you. Deciding whether to rewrite... or remove."
The grass around them began to shift subtly and rhythmically. Blades folded into shapes. Curves. Calligraphy.
Words.
A single phrase wrote itself into the earth:
Draft error detected. Awaiting instruction.
The sky flickered. Just once. Like a sentence being retyped.
Ash moved closer to Echo. "This feels like we're inside an editor's head."
Echo touched the mark on his wrist.
His ink, once stable, now shimmered faintly. But it wasn't leaking this time. It was syncing. Matching something he couldn't yet perceive.
He looked up. The world had gone still in the wrong way.
Nothing was moving unless watched.
He turned his head slowly.
Behind them, the forest they had passed through just hours ago no longer existed. It had been replaced by a blank canvas stretching to the horizon – empty, flat, unwritten.
"Look," Ash said.
Ahead, the land began to ripple. Not like water. Like grammar. Sections of the earth are rising and falling as if undergoing revision.
Then came the sound.
A breath.
Massive, quiet, and cold.
Echo clutched his chest.
"It's not wind," he said. "It's… it's pulling memory."
Curata nodded grimly. "The Canon's scanning this moment in real time. It's trying to decide where to fit you. Or whether you're an error it needs to redact."
Ash pulled his cloak tighter. "And if we run?"
"Then it follows," Curata said. "But worse. It escalates."
Echo didn't move.
The mark on his wrist was pulsing in a slow, steady rhythm. He felt the words inside him—unwritten, waiting.
He wasn't just a draft anymore.
He was something the Canon couldn't classify.
And for the first time, it had stopped breathing.