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.
