The world was still broken.
But it no longer bled ink.
The skies stitched themselves back together one color at a time. Mountains remembered their shapes. Genres, shaken and humbled, settled into a new kind of rhythm.
Not harmony.
But possibility.
The Girl and the Page
Nyra slept for three days.
When she woke, she didn't speak at first.
She just stared at her hands — once engines of chaos, now soft again, trembling with memory. She clutched the story Kael had written for her, worn and creased.
"It's not all true," she whispered. "The girl you wrote…"
Kael smiled gently. "No story is all true."
"But it could've been."
She looked up. "What now?"
Kael handed her a pen.
"Now, you write."
A New Prologue
The Continuum worked to rebuild, not just cities, but structure.
Eli helped tame rogue narratives. Althea forged bonds between rival genres. Kael rewrote the foundations of narrative law — not to control, but to protect.
And Nyra?
She wrote children's tales.
Soft ones.
Strange ones.
Stories where no one was erased. Where monsters could be misunderstood. Where endings weren't answers but invitations.
And sometimes, in the margins, she left notes for the father she was still learning to know.
Legacy
Years later, a child sat by a window, flipping through a book.
They pointed to the dedication.
"To the girl I once forgot — and the world she helped me remember."
The child looked up. "Mama, who wrote this?"
Nyra smiled.
"A man who made a lot of mistakes."
"But never the same one twice."