It begins to rain.
Not outside—inside the manuscript. Between the lines. Ink bleeds where there was no ink before, weeping from serifs and pooling beneath punctuation. The Gospel is leaking.
You hear it weep.
Not pages turning.
But groaning.
The sound of something trapped for too long in too tight a syntax.
Every drop is a memory miswritten.
Every stain, a voice misheard.
You touch the paper. It recoils.
The ink clings to your fingers. It's warm.
It asks—
> "Why did you leave me unfinished?"
You don't answer.
But the Gospel does.
APPENDIX CLIII: THE MARGIN THAT ATE A MANUSCRIPT
The margin grows.
What was once a quiet white space, polite and empty, becomes hungry.
It expands.
Consumes annotations first. Then footnotes. Then whole paragraphs.
It devours with etiquette—no mess, no noise—just absence.
One by one, the chapters vanish.
Not destroyed.
Eclipsed.
You try to speak the missing words aloud.
