The Fold was dissolving.
Ashardio watched as threads of his reality unraveled, each strand a sentence, each fragment a forgotten metaphor. He should've been terrified. But there was a strange… clarity.
Anka's words echoed:
"Who do you think wrote you, Ashardio?"
The Bone Quill still hovered near his hand, pulsing. A cursed temptation.
"I need answers." His voice felt brittle. "Not rewrites."
"Then you seek The Scribe Who Never Sleeps," Anka replied, her tone hushed. "But beware—he doesn't craft stories. He erases truths."
The name felt ancient. A being beyond authors and gods. A scribe who wrote not with ink, but with absence.
The Descent to the Bleeding Desk
Led by Anka, Ashardio stepped through the fraying walls of the Fold into a corridor made of torn manuscripts. The floor bled ink. The ceiling murmured with unsaid thoughts.
At its end awaited the Bleeding Desk.
It wasn't furniture.
It was… alive.
A grotesque construct of bones, quills, and twitching vellum skin. Upon it sprawled a figure cloaked in darkness — his form shifting, as if rejecting definition.
"The Scribe Who Never Sleeps."
He didn't look up. His hands—long, skeletal—scratched endlessly on a parchment that had no end, his quill tip bleeding red not from ink, but from the veins of the stories he siphoned.
Ashardio stepped closer.
"Am I your character?" he demanded.
The Scribe paused. Just once.
"You're not a character. You're an annotation. A marginalia that bled into the main text."
Ashardio staggered. His memories—his choices—were they merely scribbles in someone else's journal?
"Then why the Tribunal? Why the Fold? Why the curse?"
The Scribe's fingers resumed their relentless scratching.
"Because you believed the footnotes more than the story. You cursed yourself by giving weight to what was never meant to be written."
Ashardio demanded the truth of his existence.
The Scribe offered a bargain more damning than Anka's Bone Quill.
"I can show you the Final Draft. The page where your story truly ends. But once you see it, you will no longer be its author. You will become… the period."
He could know the ending. But at the cost of becoming its conclusion. A living full stop.
Ashardio's mind fractured between desire and dread.
Anka whispered,
"Choose, Ashardio. To know, or to continue pretending."
The Unseen Hand Revealed
In that moment, a crack split across the Bleeding Desk.
From it, another hand emerged.
But it wasn't skeletal.
It was his hand.
Older. Tired. Ink-stained.
The Scribe smirked,
"You've been writing yourself, over and over. Every loop, every Fold. You are the author, the character, and the reader trapped in recursion."
Ashardio's breath hitched.
He was the Scribe.
Or rather, the Scribe was an older iteration of himself, lost in an endless loop of revisions, regrets, and rewrites.
The Tribunal? Self-inflicted judgment.
The Fold? His mind's cluttered margin.
Anka? His guilt of discarded creativity.
The Choice
With trembling fingers, Ashardio reached for the Final Draft.
But this time, he didn't seek to change it.
He sought to accept it.
The moment he touched the page, the Bleeding Desk sighed. The whispers stilled. The loop halted.
Ashardio didn't disappear.
He became the story itself.
Not as a cursed footnote.
But as the main text, complete.
For the first time, the Scribe closed his eyes.
And Ashardio's voice — calm, resolute — whispered:
"End Chapter Twelve."