The tether shimmered—and then, nothing.
No crash into snowglass. No atmospheric pressure. No sensory feedback at all.
Kael landed on his feet—but didn't feel his feet land.
He looked around. The Anchor was white. Endless, vast, unmarked white—like they were standing in a blank sentence waiting to be written.
Then Myra dropped in beside him and immediately collapsed to one knee.
"My neural threads… they're being scrambled," she groaned, one hand to her temple.
Kael pulled up the interface from his chronoband. It was gibberish. Words rotated mid-letter. One label flickered between location and illusion. The air smelled like ozone and parchment.
"This isn't a standard Anchor," Kael muttered. "This is a conceptual construct."
Myra nodded weakly. "A Lexicon Anchor. Experimental. Forbidden."
Kael exhaled. "Of course it is."
The white space pulsed once—and words began to form around them.
Not spoken. Written.
Lines appeared in the air, curling like smoke, forming glowing text that read:
> "You are not supposed to be here."
Kael smirked. "Guess we found another one of Kaelen's toys."
The text reformed, now hovering between them.
> "This Anchor is unstable. It requires belief to stabilize."
"Belief in what?" Kael asked.
The sentence erased and reformed:
> "The sentence must complete itself."
Suddenly, the white around them cracked—and corridors appeared. Long, narrow hallways made entirely of floating phrases, spelling out rooms and walls and doors. A labyrinth made of unfinished thoughts.
Myra, more steady now, stood. "We're inside a recursive narrative."
Kael raised an eyebrow. "A story that doesn't know how to end?"
"Worse," she said. "A story that never began."
A distant sound echoed—shuffling paper, whispered dialogue from invisible mouths.
Kael took a step forward, and the floor beneath him wrote itself as he walked:
> Kael moved forward, unaware that each word he read now rewrote the past behind him.
He froze. "It's writing our choices as we make them."
"So don't stop moving," Myra said. "Or it won't know what happens next."
They navigated through corridors of description. Some were peaceful—others warped into loops of contradicting verbs. At one intersection, Kael saw a door that read:
> "DO NOT OPEN THIS DOOR UNLESS YOU ARE READY TO BECOME A METAPHOR."
Naturally, he tried opening it.
Myra yanked his hand back.
"Kael, I swear on all forty Anchors, if you drag us into a metaphor loop, I will delete your neural tag."
He grinned. "Just testing limits."
They kept walking.
Then, they found it.
At the heart of the labyrinth stood a throne made of punctuation—commas curling like vines, quotation marks like wings, and a crown formed from shattered ellipses.
Sitting in the throne was Kaelen.
But… not.
He was frozen. Not alive. Not dead.
Not even fully formed.
He was half-written—sentences flickering in and out across his face like errors in translation.
> A man who once wanted to be more than a story… but could not handle being a sentence.
"That's a script," Myra said. "Kaelen tried to write himself into permanence."
Kael stepped closer. "And he got stuck mid-thought."
Just then, the text in the air shifted violently:
> "This is not your chapter."
The world trembled. Letters from the walls fell like snow. The floor beneath them began to erase itself, line by line.
Kael looked down. His foot had already vanished halfway to the ankle.
"We're getting deleted!" he shouted.
Myra pulled out her emergency glyph. "Tell me something no one knows!"
"What?"
"NOW!"
Kael shouted, "I once lied to a timeline to save it! I told a queen her people would return. They never did!"
Myra slammed the glyph into the air. A new sentence burst open between them:
> "Sometimes a lie saves a world."
It formed a bridge—a staircase made of confession.
They ran.
The Anchor tried to rewrite itself, to trap them in loops, to fracture their grammar into non-being—but Kael had learned a secret:
Sometimes, truth wasn't what kept you anchored.
Story did.
The stairway twisted.
And then—
Light.
Anchor breach.
And they were gone.
---
Kael landed on solid stone. Real. Tangible. Breathing hard.
Myra beside him, clutching her side, laughing and gasping. "That was the stupidest, most poetic death trap I've ever seen."
Kael nodded. "Which means we're getting close."
She blinked. "To what?"
He stared into the darkness ahead.
"To the original story."