They didn't speak for hours after the First God vanished.
The skies, once burning with divine hostility, were now... still. Not calm. Still—like the breath before a scream. The Fifth Fragment nestled tightly in Syra's satchel, vibrating faintly against her chest like a heartbeat tied to a ticking clock.
Riven (quietly): "Do you believe him?"
Syra: "That gods leave doors when they die?"
Riven: "That we're walking into something worse than them."
Syra's eyes traced the horizon where three divine corpses had fallen—and where now, strange shadows moved in slow, liquid forms.
Syra: "I believe we're not the only things writing anymore."
They descended into the Vault of Silent Edits—an abandoned under realm once used by the gods to store narrative changes too dangerous to enact. The place wasn't sealed by doors, but by ignorance. You couldn't find it unless you remembered a story that never existed.
Syra could now.
The Vault smelled like forgotten intention.
Corridors curved with no logic. Shelves reached upward into infinity, filled with artifacts that had never been approved: rejected fates, unwritten siblings, gods who were born but never acknowledged.
Riven touched one crystal shard—and jerked back.
Riven: "I saw myself. Dying. Smiling. Holding a child."
Syra: "That might've been your original ending."
Riven: "Do I even want to know what mine is now?"
She didn't answer.
Because she'd already seen hers.
And it hadn't involved survival.
At the center of the Vault was a table.
Upon it: a single page.
Blank.
Yet humming.
Syra approached, her footsteps echoing louder than they should have.
The page turned to ink as she neared—not from writing, but from her presence.
Voice (soft): "You weren't supposed to find this."
Author.
He stepped into the light, this time carrying no blade, no mask, no threat. Just that same tired weight behind his eyes. The look of someone who had tried to stop an avalanche with a whisper.
Syra: "You've been following me."
Author: "No. You've been retracing me."
He gestured to the page.
Author: "This is the first draft I ever destroyed. A story I never finished. A world I abandoned because it hated its own writer."
Riven: "You mean…?"
Author: "Yes. This world."
Syra's breath caught.
Author: "I tried to write a world of choice. Of power. Of people strong enough to resist me."
He looked at her.
Author: "And I failed."
Syra stared at the blank page. It rippled with something dark beneath the surface—anger, maybe. Regret.
Syra: "But you started again."
Author: "Yes. And you were the result."
The truth hit her like ice.
She wasn't a character meant to grow.
She was a correction meant to replace the story that failed.
Syra: "I'm the rewrite of a world you couldn't fix."
Author: "You were my attempt to erase guilt."
He didn't flinch when he said it.
And that hurt more.
Syra: "So what happens when I reach the seventh fragment? When I get the Key?"
Author: "Then you write the version I couldn't."
Syra: "And if I fail?"
Author (softly): "Then everything ends. Not just this story. Every thread that leads to it. Every realm. Every choice. All of it."
Syra turned her gaze back to the page.
Her fingers brushed it—
And she saw it.
The original version of herself.
Cold. Unfeeling. Divine by design.
A tyrant.
A godkiller without mercy, without flame.
She gasped, tearing her hand back.
Riven: "What did you see?"
Syra: "What I could've been if I wasn't broken first."
The Author stepped away, leaving behind only a whisper.
Author: "The last fragment lies beyond the threshold of origin. But you already knew that."
And then he was gone.
Outside the Vault, the skies had changed again.
But not into light.
They were now filled with black text—lines of code unraveling from the heavens like dripping blood.
And in the distance, something massive stirred.
A door.
A lock.
And the final test.
Syra clenched her fist.
Five fragments.
One locked Key.
And two gods left to fall.
End of Chapter 14 – Next: Chapter 15, where Syra earns the true Key