The sealed ending of *The Story of the Ninth Reader* had haunted Aether since the moment he first laid eyes on it, but it was only now, standing before its final pages once more, that he understood he had been asking the wrong question all along. He had assumed the blankness meant the story was unfinished — a manuscript still waiting for its final chapter to be lived before it could be written. But as Living Memory pulsed against his chest, reacting to the empty pages with an intensity it had never shown before, he began to suspect the truth was far stranger, and far more deliberate, than simple incompletion.
The Forgotten Reader stood beside him, his pale hands folded, his eyes fixed on the same blankness that had drawn Aether here in the first place.
"These pages are not unfinished," the Forgotten Reader said quietly. "They were never blank because nothing had been written. They are blank because something was *removed.*"
