Aether had thought he understood what it meant to stand at the edge of something vast. He had walked through the Vault of Unwritten Truths and felt Living Memory recoil at the sight of blank pages that were not truly blank. He had believed, in some quiet corner of himself, that he had already glimpsed the deepest layer the vision could offer him.
He was wrong.
The moment he crossed into the final layer, at the Edge of the First Story, all of that fell away like a curtain being torn from a stage that had never needed decoration in the first place. There was no vault here. No shelves, no archives, no towering stacks of forgotten manuscripts waiting to be read. There was nothing that could be called a place at all, not in any sense his mind was built to process.
