White swallowed him, and then the white learned how to breathe.
Lio hit something that wasn't ground and slid across a surface that remembered being a floor only after his body insisted on friction. He rolled, sprang to his feet, and found himself standing in a horizonless plain of parchment skin—creases like dried riverbeds, hairline tears bleeding ink. Above, the sky was not a color so much as a decision: blank until something chose otherwise.
A sentence blazed overhead—alien glyphs that hurt to look at. It wrote itself without writer, burning across the firmament like a scar.
The bridge is inside.
Cold sank into his bones. He could still feel the pull of three presences—shadows that weren't shapes—moving without destination, their attention a pressure that made his knees want to bend. He refused.
"Not your page," he muttered, tasting iron. "Not your book."
