The square lay silent at last. Not the silence of defeat, nor the smothering hush of the Piper's song, but the fragile quiet of children who had survived.
Cipher stood at the center of it, his scythe's glow ebbing from a blaze to a faint shimmer. The cobblestones around him were cracked, charred in streaks where silver light had clashed with poisoned melody. Rats lay in twisted heaps, already dissolving into shadow-dust. The air still carried a faint ring, as though some echo of the flute resisted death. But the children… they were breathing. They were standing.
That was enough.
A little girl with blood dried at her temple stared up at him. Her lips trembled, but she forced a word out anyway."Teacher."
Cipher's chest tightened. That word. It always carried too much weight, too much memory. But tonight, he didn't turn away from it. His tired smile reached his eyes, soft despite the exhaustion burning in his bones."Yes… teacher is my occupation." He crouched, lowering the scythe so the glow didn't blind her. "But my name—my real name—is Mr. Starlight."
Her small eyes widened, and for a moment she seemed to memorize it as though it were treasure. Cipher hoped she would. Names mattered. They reminded you that you weren't just a character, not just a pawn in someone else's ending.
He rose again, looking over the group. "You all know your names. Hold them close. That's how you keep your story from being stolen again."
The Automaton on his shoulder clicked and whirred, its voice pitched with unusual sharpness. "Cipher, the structure of this tale is destabilizing. Remaining too long risks exposure to residual Fade patterns."
He exhaled through his nose. "Always so clinical." He reached up and tapped the Automaton's brass casing with two fingers. "I think I'm going to start calling you Auto. Rolls off the tongue better."
The Automaton froze for a fraction of a second, gears catching mid-spin. "…Auto." Its glass eye flickered. "This designation is acceptable."
Cipher smirked faintly. "Good. Then it's settled."
The children gathered closer, clinging to one another. Cipher could feel their fear still, but it wasn't hollow anymore. It had roots now—names, voices, each other. He gave a final nod to them, resting the scythe upright.
"Stay together. Light candles when the dark grows too loud. Speak your names when silence presses in. You'll remember this night, not as the end of your story, but the start of your own."
Their faces reflected the faint silver glow like fragile stars. Cipher turned away before the weight in his chest broke him open. He pressed the scythe into the air, tracing the familiar arc that should have cut a doorway into the Void. Silver sparks flared, seaming the night. The Automaton—Auto—buzzed with approval.
"Transition should stabilize in three—"
The doorway ruptured.
It wasn't the clean tear of parchment giving way to blackness. It was a shriek, a violent rending, as though a thousand books had been ripped apart at once. Sparks sprayed wildly, burning out midair. The arc buckled, warped. Cipher's brow furrowed.
"…That's wrong."
The Automaton's voice pitched sharp, static crackling through it. "Cipher—severe anomaly detected. The narrative thread is not intact. Warning: this is not the Void!"
The ground lurched beneath them. Cipher dug his boots against the stones, but the world itself convulsed like it had no anchor. He shoved the scythe down, trying to stabilize the seam. Light screamed, bending inward.
"Hold on, Auto!"
The pull came like a whirlpool. Not forward, not outward. Down. His stomach dropped as the square inverted above him. The children vanished, their forms whisked away into smudged shadow. He tried to reach for them, but the current seized his limbs. The Automaton screeched alarms, gears spinning helplessly. Cipher's grip on the scythe burned raw as the void itself yanked him into its unraveling.
"Cipher—" Auto's voice cracked. "We are being redirected!"
The light gave way. He fell.
He landed hard on ash.
The taste of it filled his mouth before he could push himself up. The air was hot and brittle, carrying the scent of old smoke and something wetter, like rotting parchment left in the rain. He spat, forcing his eyes open.
The sky—or what passed for one—was a ceiling of torn pages, endless sheets of yellowed paper fluttering in slow, soundless winds. Words crawled across them in black ink, forming fragments of fairy tales, only to blotch, smear, and vanish.
Cipher staggered to his feet, scythe in hand. Auto righted itself on his shoulder, glass eye twitching erratically. "System check… partial integrity restored. Cipher, this… this is not the Void."
"No." Cipher turned slowly. His voice was low, grim. "This is something else."
The landscape stretched like a nightmare library abandoned to rot. Towers made of broken books leaned like crooked gravestones. A shattered glass slipper lay half-buried in the ash, large enough to crawl into like a carriage. Rusted toy soldiers, their tin bodies melted, marched endlessly into a river of black ink that devoured them without ripples.
A collapsed gingerbread house jutted from the ground, its sugared walls hardened into jagged thorns. Trees with pages for leaves stood twisted, their branches tangled with ribbons that writhed like veins.
The whole place pulsed faintly, as though it were breathing.
Auto's voice was a trembling monotone. "Composite anomaly detected. Fragments of multiple tales compressed without narrative separation. This world should not exist."
Cipher dragged in a breath, slow, steady. His hands flexed on the scythe's shaft, anchoring himself against the suffocating wrongness. "Then we're somewhere we're not supposed to be."
A sound rose in the distance. Not music, not words. A low groan, like timber under strain—or perhaps like a thousand voices exhaling at once.
The ground shifted. Beneath the ash, something stirred.
Cipher raised his scythe instinctively. Silver light bled along the runes, though faint, as though the world itself was trying to smother it. Auto's gears clicked frantically. "Cipher—movement detected. Estimated mass… unquantifiable."
From the horizon, a shadow lifted itself, rising higher and higher until it blotted the parchment sky. Its form wasn't singular. It was stitched. A claw of bone from one tale. A crown of melted glass from another. A torso wrapped in chains of hair, dragging behind it a gown of torn wolf pelts. Its eyes were dozens of shattered mirrors, each reflecting Cipher's pale face back at him.
The air bent under its presence.
Cipher's lips parted, but no words came at first. Finally, he whispered:"A graveyard."
The thing groaned again, and ash cascaded down its form like snow.
Auto's voice dropped to a fearful hush. "Cipher… it sees us."
Cipher rolled his shoulders, bringing the scythe to ready stance. His body screamed with exhaustion from the Piper's battle, but there would be no rest here. He met the storm of mirrored eyes bearing down on him.
"Then let it."
The ash stirred as the colossus beings began to crawl toward them, each movement dragging chains of broken stories behind it.
And Cipher braced himself what was to come.