The ink had never truly dried.
It waited, beneath everything—beneath worlds and words and the long stretch of silence that had followed the war. Beneath the Garden's roots, deeper even than the Archive's buried halls, lay something older than the Loom. Something that preceded it.
It was not narrative.
It was what came before narrative.
The First Ink.
And it was moving.
Jevan felt it in his dreams.
A slow ripple through stillness. A current running beneath all thought. It didn't speak, not in words, but in impressions—ancient and heavy, like the smell of rain on stone, or the shadow of a memory before memory itself.
He woke with a gasp, the journal glowing faintly on his chest. Another line had written itself overnight:
Not all origins are beginnings.
