Chapter Nineteen: The City That Shouldn't Be
The path was not a path.
It was a sentence—stretched across the land, etched into the hills in golden ink, bending through forests, valleys, and dreams.
Soot followed it alone.
Each step awakened more of the world.
A songbird hatched from a lyric.
Rivers hummed lullabies in foreign tongues.
The wind whispered fragments of stories he didn't remember writing.
On the seventh morning, he found the city.
It wasn't marked on Selis's memory-map.
It wasn't… right.
The buildings were shaped like punctuation—towers curled like question marks, domes like periods, stairs that looped like ampersands.
The city wasn't built.
It had been remembered.
From somewhere else.
"Welcome to Semara," a man said, sitting atop a stack of floating ellipses.
"The city that shouldn't be—but is."
Soot narrowed his eyes. "You know who I am?"
The man smiled. "We all do, Ink Prophet. We're the ones your world accidentally included."
Semara pulsed with narrative dissonance.
A cat spoke in limericks.
Shadows blinked independently of their owners.
One woman wore a cloak made entirely of unspoken apologies.
Children drew maps of places they'd never seen—but which became real once inked.
Soot walked through it slowly.
"Why didn't the rewrite erase this?" he asked aloud.
An old librarian with no mouth answered in sign:
"Because we were written with too much longing."
Inside the city's core, Soot found a tower made of failed metaphors.
At its top: a room where the walls wept ink.
And in that room sat a machine.
No gears.
No wires.
Just a single sheet of paper, constantly writing and erasing itself.
A Ministry sigil glowed faintly at its base.
Soot froze.
"No…"
"It survived," said a voice behind him.
Selis stepped out of shadow, breathless.
"I felt something pull me here. The quill trembled."
Soot approached the paper.
It read:
PROPHECY RESYNCHRONIZING… 61%
He backed away. "It's trying to… rebuild the original canon."
"Of course it is," Selis said. "The Ministry embedded fragments of itself into every draft. We didn't destroy them. We just delayed them."
Suddenly, the paper blurred.
A new word emerged:
HOST DETECTED.
Soot's body stiffened.
The seventh quill began to float from its place on his back, pulled by an unseen force.
"No—NO!"
Selis lunged, grabbing it mid-air.
The room exploded with light.
Both were flung back.
When the smoke cleared, the quill was still.
But Soot…
Soot had changed.
The word choice on his hand had darkened—twisting slightly at the edges, curling like corrupted code.
Selis stared. "It touched you."
"It's rewriting me," he whispered. "Trying to turn me into what I was supposed to be."
They left the tower in silence.
Outside, Semara began to fracture.
Buildings faded into outline.
Words peeled off stone.
"Is it collapsing?" Soot asked.
"No," Selis said. "It's being drafted again. The Ministry fragment is waking up, and it's starting to force its version of the world back into place."
"But it's not real anymore," Soot argued. "Talia is mine."
"It doesn't matter," Selis said darkly. "The Ministry's code doesn't need to be real. It only needs to be believed."
They exited the city as its reality began to fuzz.
Behind them, the walls of Semara shimmered—turning gray, then vanishing entirely.
Soot turned to look one last time.
And in the distance, in the rubble of the tower…
a woman stood.
Tali.
Or someone who looked like her.
But wrong.
Too still.
Too symmetrical.
Too… written.
Then she smiled.
And vanished.
Selis grabbed his shoulder.
"Did you see that?"
He nodded slowly.
"She's being rebuilt. Just like me."
Selis's hand tightened.
"Then we have to move faster. Before the Ministry finishes rewriting her—and you."
They made camp that night on the edge of a dream-canyon—its cliffs lined with etched regrets.
Soot sat staring into the fire, silent.
Selis spoke softly. "If they bring her back… it won't be her."
"I know."
"She won't remember you."
"I know."
"She might try to kill you."
He looked at her.
"I'd let her. If that's what it takes to save the real one."
Selis turned away, fighting tears.
"She'd never want that."
The next morning, the wind changed.
A voice whispered from far off.
"The draft is correcting.
Choice is closing."
Soot looked to the horizon.
The land twisted—reforming itself into chapters.
The Ministry was turning Talia back into a book.
And Soot had only a few pages left to stop it.