The sound of pages turning grew louder, each rustle echoing through the Inkless Realm with the weight of cosmic inevitability. Lio felt reality bend around the approaching presence, not being rewritten like the Original Author's tyrannical narrative, but being experienced with an intensity that made existence itself more real than it had ever been before.
The Reader was still distant, but already its influence was transforming everything it touched. Where the Original Author sought to control and the various Originless entities had tried to impose their individual visions, the Reader simply... absorbed. Experienced. Made everything more vivid, more present, more undeniably there.
Reed's reformed confidence wavered as he stared into the darkness beyond the Inkless Realm. "We need to move. Now. The Reader doesn't destroy stories—it makes them so real that they become inescapable. Perfect prisons of their own narrative logic."
