They stepped through the unfinished doorway and emerged into a corridor of suspended grammar. The very air twisted in clauses, and the floor was a shifting syntax of commas and em-dashes. Rafael paused as the Source-Thread thrummed in his wrist.
This place wasn't just edited, it was still editing itself.
"We're inside a live draft," Mira whispered. Her visor flickered as it tried to parse the cascading tenses around them. "The Unmother's doing. She's rewriting on the fly."
"Good," Rafael muttered. "Then we know she's close."
The corridor forked, splitting like a semicolon: two ideas too close to part but too distinct to merge. Lira took point, scanning each passage.
"The left leads into character bloat," she said. "The right… a recursive narrative trap."
"So both are terrible," Bryn deadpanned. "Standard choices."
Rafael closed his eyes and reached inward. The Source-Thread pulsed, and a memory surged forward.
Rafael, broken but defiant, staring down the Voidworm in a reality long overwritten. It reminded him that sometimes the wrong choices were the only ones that mattered.
"Right," he said. "We cut through the recursion. If she wants us to spiral, we'll force a straight line."
They entered the trap.
At once, the world collapsed inward. Walls folded into footnotes, and time reversed in italics. Mira's visor screamed warnings. "Temporal bleed! We're reliving the same moment!"
They turned a corner—only to reappear at the corridor's entrance. Again. And again.
Oren tried marking the wall with sarcasm. It replied with a footnote.
"We need a disruptive element," Juno said, calmly mid-spin, striking her shadow-self for the third time. "Something inconsistent."
"I've got just the thing." Mira flipped her visor open and sang a line of a theme song from a non-canon parody episode.
The corridor jolted. A split formed in the wall. Through it, a broken library opened before them; shelves of unfiled endings, ideas in jars, discarded rewrites floating in zero-G metaphor.
But the library was alive. Books fluttered like birds, papers rearranged themselves with whispers of alternative outcomes. A grammar storm rolled through the rafters.
In the center: a floating platform, and on it—a seed of code pulsing like a heartbeat.
"The Anchor," Lira breathed.
But they weren't alone. A figure stepped forward from behind the shelves, wearing Rafael's face, but twisted. It shimmered with broken intent, stitched from leftover plot threads and abandoned arcs.
"Welcome to the final draft," the echo-Rafael said. "But you don't belong here anymore."
Blades sang. The battle was instant.
This version of Rafael moved like regret with purpose. Every strike he landed exposed an emotional fault line. Bryn was knocked down by a line of doubt she hadn't confronted since her betrayal. Mira nearly short-circuited when her copy used logic she'd once discarded.
Lira faced a version of herself who'd obeyed every canon order, every flawed prophecy. They danced through conflicting timelines, blades crossing in synchrony and defiance.
Oren, true to form, challenged his echo to a duel of tone. He countered each attack with increasingly awful puns:
"You look like you skipped your character arc!" he shouted, swinging a narrative hook.
His echo groaned. "That pun was an abomination."
"Exactly! I'm the typo you never fixed!"
Then Oren paused, dramatically cleared his throat, and performed a failed monologue from a draft he'd buried long ago:
"I walk not for victory, but for vending machines denied—nay, destroyed—in the first act!"
His mirror cracked under narrative strain.
Juno's opponent wielded silence like a weapon, but she met it with clarity forged in failure. Each clash of their blades was an unresolved poem. Juno bled a line of forgotten truth:
"I was never meant to lead. That's why I must."
Then struck cleanly with a vow she had never dared speak:
"I am not your footnote—I am the rewrite. And I'm gonna live. Gonna love. Gonna be loved!"
Mira's echo tried a logic loop: "You are the sum of abandoned theorems."
Mira responded, "Then I'll be the equation you can't solve," and disarmed her copy with a twist of paradox and a slap of math humor: "Q.E.D, bitch!"
Rafael fought himself, the Source-Thread snarling against its corrupted twin. Blow for blow, word for word.
"You're just a leftover subplot," Rafael hissed. "A cliffhanger that never deserved resolution."
"Then prove it," the echo whispered. "Rewrite me."
And Rafael did. With one clean stroke, both blade and intent sharpened by everything he had reclaimed, he severed the echo, which dissolved into gold dust and vanished into the Anchor.
The room quieted.
Lira stepped forward and touched the Anchor. "It's ready," she said. "But the Unmother will feel this."
"She already does," Mira added. "Reality's ticking faster."
A tremor passed through the room. All of them felt it—not just physically, but across narrative layers. Elsewhere, pages flipped.
"Let her come," Juno said, calm and absolute.
"After snacks, preferably," Oren mumbled, wiping a trickle of sarcasm from his lip.
They laughed again. Less weary this time. The laughter of people on the edge—but laughing anyway.
Rafael looked to the Anchor, now glowing with a gentle resolve. "We broke the loop."
"And what comes next?" Bryn asked.
Mira smiled slightly. "Next? We stop playing by her edit."
They had reclaimed their syntax. Next came the rewrite.
***