(Author here; Please leave comets and power stones)
Lela stood at the threshold of the new door, her palm resting gently against its surface — obsidian veined with something that shimmered like starlight but hummed like memory. It had no frame. No hinge. No clear destination.
It had simply appeared, humming with a question no one else seemed able to hear.
She didn't hesitate.
She stepped through.
The world on the other side folded around her like a curtain of dusk. There was no sound at first — not even the echo of her own heartbeat. Only stillness. And a scent like parchment and petrichor.
Then came the whisper.
"You should not be here."
Lela opened her eyes.
She was standing in a vast, abandoned city of stone and ink. The architecture twisted in impossible geometry — buildings stacked like forgotten books, streets spiraled in fractals, doorways opened to nowhere or, worse, into themselves. The sky above pulsed in rhythms, as though breathing.
It was beautiful.
And terribly wrong.
At the heart of the city stood a tower — tall, fractured, and humming with restrained potential. As Lela walked toward it, shadows moved beneath her feet, not following her path but recording it. Each step she took left no footprint, but words in a forgotten script.
She knelt and ran her fingers across the markings. They shimmered briefly before fading back into the stone.
"Not ink," she murmured. "Not memory, either."
"Recordings," came a voice. "But only of those who dare walk unwritten paths."
She turned.
A figure stood there, cloaked in a robe stitched from torn pages. His face was obscured, his eyes soft with sorrow.
"Who are you?" Lela asked.
"The Gatewarden," the figure replied. "I tend what has been forgotten. This place… was once a chapter. A gate between many stories."
"A chapter?" she echoed.
"One that was written — and then erased. No reader ever turned its page. No author reclaimed it. It became…" He gestured to the crumbling city. "This."
Lela's throat tightened. The air here was thick with potential gone stale. This was not a place that had never been written — it was a place deliberately left behind.
She looked around. "Why bring me here?"
"Because the Codex remembers," said the Gatewarden. "Even what others choose to forget."
Lela explored the city with the Gatewarden walking silently beside her.
Every structure they passed whispered half-formed thoughts — beginnings of stories that had never been resolved. A window whispered a lullaby that ended with a question. A stairwell spoke a warning in a child's voice. A door offered a name she did not know, and asked only one thing:
"Will you finish me?"
At the center of the tower, they reached a room filled with floating pages — torn from stories never told. Some flickered with imagery. Others wept ink that disappeared before it touched the floor.
"Why are they here?" Lela asked.
"Because they have no place to go."
"Can't they be rewritten?"
"That is not my gift," said the Gatewarden. "But perhaps it is yours."
She stepped into the pages. They stirred around her, like birds startled into flight. One landed in her palm.
He held the knife, but the knife held the truth.
The sentence ached with untold weight. Lela closed her hand around the page.
"Then I will carry you," she whispered.
And the page sank into her skin — not painfully, but like a memory taking root.
The tower shuddered.
The ground trembled beneath their feet.
From the base of the tower, lights began to glow — flickering from page to page, phrase to phrase, across the city.
The Codex was reaching for the forgotten.
Not to erase or rewrite them — but to restore their voice.
"You are a bridge," said the Gatewarden, watching her.
"No," Lela said. "I'm a listener."
She knelt again, this time in the center of a spiral-shaped plaza. The stones beneath her pulsed. She laid her hand flat, and whispered:
"I am here. I hear you."
A burst of light rippled from the ground outward.
And suddenly, the city was filled with whispers — not haunting, but hopeful.
Ghost pages gathered. They hovered. They waited.
And one by one, they began to reassemble.
Among the drifting pages, Lela found one unlike the others.
It did not flicker.
It did not weep.
It sang.
But the song was fractured, split into sharp harmonies and broken verses.
"This one fought to be remembered," said the Gatewarden. "Even as it was silenced."
Lela held the page carefully. Its script was jagged — as though written in pain.
I was never a hero. Only a beginning no one trusted.
Lela's heart tightened.
"Who was this?"
"A child," the Gatewarden said. "Whose story ended before it began. A side character denied voice. A footnote unworthy of arc."
"No one is unworthy," Lela whispered.
"Then give them voice."
She drew a thread of story from her palm — the same thread that once helped her unlock the riddle of her own gate. She bound it gently around the singing page.
The song smoothed.
Softened.
Shifted.
And the page opened into a door.
The door revealed a garden — not lush or wild, but growing. Slowly. Gently. Uncertainly.
A child sat there. Small. Shadowy. Their features undefined, as if still being imagined.
They looked up at her.
"You're not scared of me?"
"No," Lela said. "Because you're part of the story."
"But they cut me out."
"That doesn't mean you didn't matter."
The child's eyes welled with light. They reached out, and Lela took their hand.
The moment they touched, the entire city exhaled — a long, slow breath of release.
The erased had been heard.
The forgotten had been seen.
The silence had been broken.
When Lela stepped back into the tower plaza, the city had changed.
No longer ruin.
No longer mute.
It was still quiet, but it was the quiet of waiting — of readiness.
The Gatewarden stood at the center of it all, smiling faintly.
"You've done what I could not," he said. "You listened not to the echo… but to the pause before the sound."
She nodded. "That's where the next story always begins."
From his robe, the Gatewarden drew a single, final page.
Your gate is yours again.
She accepted it.
It shimmered in her hands and formed into a doorway — not to leave the city, but to carry it forward.
"This place isn't forgotten anymore," she said.
"No," the Gatewarden agreed. "It's part of the chorus now."
Lela stepped back through the new door.
But she was not alone.
The singing page had become a new companion — a child of voice, formed of narrative and presence. Not quite character. Not quite idea. But real.
The Codex stirred at their arrival.
The glade was quieter now. Most others had passed on into stories of their own. But Mary stood waiting, and the Friend stepped forward with eyes wide.
"What did you find?" he asked.
Lela smiled and opened her palm.
The thread that now wove through her fingers pulsed with a new tone.
"A world not lost. Just waiting."
The Friend looked at the child beside her and nodded slowly.
"Then the Codex just grew again."
They turned, together, toward the next door.