Ash and ink rained.
The sky was still burning with words, the sentence that had tried to erase Arden Gate etched across the heavens in fire:
This town does not belong to the story.
But the sentence had not finished. Because he had stepped into it.
Lio's body trembled where the letters met his skin. They didn't burn like flame; they burned like recognition. Each word carved itself into him, trying to overwrite him as commentary, footnote, correction.
He was not resisting anymore. He was bargaining.
The wall remained. The boy still clung to it, laughing even as fear skated beneath his grin. Maren still carried her basket of herbs, scolding the sky as though stubbornness were its own theology. The baker still hummed badly in a kitchen that barely remembered it was a kitchen.
The town lived.
Because Lio had given up his name.
But the price was not finished.
