The world reassembled in jagged fragments.
Lena gasped as solid ground slammed into her knees, the morgue's sterile walls replaced by the damp stone of a forgotten crypt. The air tasted of mildew and old blood. Before her, the Last Witness stood motionless, its stitched mouth twitching as it cradled the skin-bound book.
Mira was gone. The dagger. The screams. All vanished—except for the words now searing Lena's vision:
"Once upon a time, there was a girl who loved stories too much."
The Witness extended a skeletal finger, pointing past her.
Lena turned.
The crypt's back wall wasn't stone.
It was flesh.
Pulsing. Breathing. Stretched taut over an archway of fused human bones. At its center, a single eye snapped open, its pupil a swirling vortex of ink.
A voice echoed from the depths, soft and melodic—a voice that shouldn't exist:
"Hello, Lena."
Then the wall screamed.
---
The First Revelation
The flesh split like a curtain, revealing a woman seated at a writing desk.
She was beautiful in the way old paintings were beautiful—flawless and lifeless. Her ink-stained fingers hovered over an open book, its pages blank. Her eyes were the same void-black as the Witness's, but her mouth…
Her mouth was unstitched.
And smiling.
"I've been waiting for you," she said. "My favorite character."
Lena's breath hitched. The scars on her palms burned with recognition.
"You're the author," she whispered.
The woman laughed, a sound like pages turning. "Oh no, darling. I'm just the editor."
She tapped the book before her. The pages flipped wildly, stopping on an illustration Lena knew too well—the Liber Mortis, its cover stitched with human hair.
"The original author," the woman continued, "is why you're here."
Then she ripped out the page.
The crypt dissolved.
---
The Second Lie
Lena fell through memory like a stone through ice.
She saw:
- A young woman in 12th-century Prague, weeping as she stitched her own lips shut—not to bind the shadow god, but to silence it.
- The first Keeper (not a monk—a scribe) carving words into her skin, her blood becoming the book's first ink.
- The moment it all went wrong: the shadow god tasting her stories, then demanding more.
The vision shattered.
Lena lay on cold stone, the woman's polished boots inches from her face.
"She thought she was writing a prison," the woman mused. "She was writing a feast."
She crouched, her ink-black eyes reflecting Lena's hollow stare.
"And you, my dear, are the main course."
---
The Third Incision
The Witness moved suddenly, its bone-quill fingers slashing downward.
Not at Lena.
At the book.
The skin-bound cover shrieked as the quill pierced it, black ichor spraying across the woman's face. She recoiled, her perfect features blistering where the ink struck.
"YOU—" she hissed.
The Witness didn't speak. It simply opened its stitched mouth—
—and Alistair's voice poured out:
"The editor lied. The original sin wasn't creating the book."
It plunged its hand into the book's gushing wound, pulling free a single, pulsing page.
"It was binding the author inside it."
The page bore a name Lena didn't recognize—Anya Kovac—written in shaky, desperate strokes.
The woman screamed.
"GIVE THAT BACK!"
The crypt trembled. The flesh walls peeled backward, revealing endless shelves of books—each one bound in human skin, each one screaming.
Lena grabbed the page.
The moment her fingers touched it, she remembered:
Herself, kneeling in this same crypt centuries ago, a needle in her hand, whispering:
"The only way to kill a story is to finish it."
Then—
The page ignited.
---
The Aftermath
Fire erupted in Lena's hands—not the black flames of the book, but golden ones.
The woman (the editor? the jailer?) howled as the fire spread, her flawless skin cracking like old parchment. The Witness watched, its hollow eyes reflecting the blaze.
The skin-bound book thrashed in its grip, its pages curling like dying insects.
Lena expected it to burn.
It didn't.
Instead, the flames rewrote it—the ink rearranging, the cover mending, the title shifting until it read:
"THE LAST KEEPER'S TALE"
By Lena Carter.
The woman lunged—
And the Witness caught her, its fingers sinking into her throat.
"No more edits," it rasped in Alistair's voice.
Then it ripped out her tongue.
---
The Last Whisper
Silence.
The crypt was gone. Lena stood in an empty white room, the book resting innocently in her hands.
The Witness was nowhere to be seen.
But on the wall before her, written in fresh blood, were three words:
"FINISH YOUR STORY."
Then—
A knock at the door.
Not three raps.
Not one.
Forty-one.
Precise. Relentless.
Counting down.
---