Aether stepped through the final threshold of the Vault of Unwritten Truths, and the world he had known simply ceased to apply.
Behind him, the torn page of the Ninth Reader's story still pulsed with its restless silver light, still refused to fully separate or fully heal. Ahead of him, there was nothing he recognized as a place at all. No shelves. No stone. No manuscripts stacked in towering silence. Only an endless expanse of shifting, breathing light, as though he had stepped not into a room but into the space behind every room that had ever existed.
The Forgotten Reader did not follow him through.
Aether turned back once, half expecting to see the old man's weathered face and the familiar warning in his eyes. Instead he saw only the boundary itself, a shimmering seam in reality that the Forgotten Reader stood before but could not cross. The ancient Reader's hand pressed flat against an invisible wall, his expression caught somewhere between reverence and grief.
