Cosmic Ruler

Chapter 637: Ambiguity XVII

He walked without sound.

Not silence—but absence, the kind that folds over behind you, leaving no trace of ever having been.

The Binder—his name forgotten, buried under the weight of stories left untold—moved beneath the shifting sky of Inkwell Reach. Where he stepped, reality bent slightly, not in protest but in recognition. Not even the Concord Tree dared interrupt.

He had not been summoned.

He had awoken—because the wound in the Margin was not merely a breach.

It was a summons.

Jevan saw him first, from the spiraled Archive balconies.

The moment his eyes found the figure, the glyphs around him shuddered and dimmed.

He bowed instinctively.

Not out of reverence.

But because every fiber of the world around him did.

“The Binder,” he murmured. “But you were part of the Lost Fold.”

The figure looked up. His eyes were not eyes. They were the blank spaces between paragraphs. When he spoke, it was not with voice, but with implication—like a footnote in one’s thoughts.

“I was. Until she read the glyph.”

In the infirmary, Callen sat up with a start.

Her breath fogged, though the room was warm.

The dreams had grown sharper—less surreal, more specific.

An Author spoke to her.

But the Author had no voice.

No shape.

Only a feeling.

And now it pressed into her skull like a page trying to be turned from within.

She rose, pulling her coat tight. The inkstain on her ribs had spread—not outward, but inward, curling around her bones like a narrative parasite.