White.
Not blinding light, but an absence that devoured everything else. The world around Lio had no shape, no edge, no sound. Only emptiness stretching infinitely in every direction.
For a heartbeat, he thought he had been erased. That his desperate stand—clinging to his own name against the Narrativeless storm—had failed.
Then the white began to ripple.
Letters drifted past him, black strokes scrawled on invisible parchment. Some curled into shapes he recognized, fragments of words from his childhood. Others warped mid-curve, becoming symbols that no human hand could write.
He reached for one. The instant his fingers touched the ink, it dissolved into smoke. A whisper followed, carried not by air but by memory itself:
You left a page blank.
Lio froze. He knew that voice.
"Shia…?"
