That night, they didn't camp.
They simply stopped walking. The narrative tension around them thinned just enough to breathe, and that was reason enough to rest.
Echo sat apart from the others, perched on a slope of half-written hills. The stars above blinked in patterns that looked like runes, but changed every time he tried to read them.
He rolled up his sleeve.
The thread from the burned clearing had fused with the ink on his wrist. It no longer glowed. But it pulsed, gently, as if keeping time with something deeper than a heartbeat.
A name kept surfacing in his mind.
Verin.
Not like a character. Not even like a legend.
More like a question the Canon had never answered.
Curata approached, cloak brushing parchment grass. She didn't sit immediately. She studied the way the ink shifted around Echo's fingers.
"You're drawing from something older now," she said. "The way the ink moves. The way it reacts."
Echo nodded. "It's not just mine."
"No. It never was."
He looked at her.
"Your ink… was seeded. Not generated."
"By whom?"
"By a myth. Maybe Verin. Maybe someone before him."
He stared at the shifting lines on his skin. "What does that mean?"
"It means you weren't meant to be just another tool of the story. You were made to rewrite it."
Echo shook his head. "But I barely know who I am."
"That's the point," Curata said softly. "They erased who you were. But your ink remembers."
She sat beside him.
"When the Canon finds something unpredictable, it buries it in drafts. Wraps it in editorial chains. Gives it amnesia. But you're leaking."
He blinked. "Leaking?"
"Memory. Motive. Meaning. It's seeping back in. That's why your ink doesn't behave like ours. It's not bound by this version of the story."
They sat in silence.
Echo dipped a finger into his ink and traced a shape into the ground. Not a letter. Not a glyph. Just instinct.
The soil drank it.
No rejection. No correction.
A few feet away, Ash snored softly beneath a folded blanket of exposition.
Curata whispered, "Do you want to remember?"
Echo looked down at the shape he'd drawn.
"Yes. But I'm afraid of what I'll become if I do."
She didn't argue. Just nodded, as if that fear was the most natural thing in the world.
And maybe it was.
Because somewhere in the quiet, the stars stopped shifting.
They formed a single word.
Verin.
Then blinked out, one by one, as if acknowledging the name had used up all their light.